Confederate Flag Represents Racism and Slavery

by

John J. Dunphy

(Originally published in The Telegraph of Alton, IL in 2015)

The Ku Klux Klan has received permission to hold a rally at the South Carolina Statehouse on July 18 to protest efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds, and this liberal activist couldn’t be more pleased. Why? Defenders of the Confederate flag have consistently argued that it represents “heritage, not hate.” As a Daily Kos columnist noted, “I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate what the Confederate flag means to southern ‘heritage’ than to have a white supremacist group with a long American history of vicious murders march around yelling and waving it at people.”

This flag’s heritage is as toxic and shameful as the swastika of Nazi Germany. It represents eleven southern states that “collectively committed treason,” as John Prager succinctly put it in “It Turns Out White Support For Confederate Flag Really IS About Racism, Not Heritage.” Prager nailed it when he wrote, “The flag was created by people who rose up to kill their countrymen over their belief that black people are inferior.” White supremacy and perpetual slavery for blacks were the twin venomous pillars of the Confederacy. In the words of Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, “Our new government is founded upon…the great moral truth that the negro is not the equal of the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The states that joined the Confederacy boldly proclaimed their commitment to slavery and cited it as their reason for seceding from the United States. In an article for The Atlantic titled “What This Cruel War Was Over,” Ta-Nehisi Coates allowed the Confederate states to speak for themselves. Texas accused Northerners of demanding “the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races” and avowing “their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.” Mississippi affirmed, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Louisiana was equally frank in declaring, “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.”

Diehard Rebels extolled the Confederacy’s racism long after the Civil War ended. Coates quoted a 1904 address by Congressman John Sharp Williams to the United Confederate Veterans in which he stated that Confederate armies had fought for “the supremacy of the white man’s civilization in the country which he proudly claimed his own.” A 1906 article in the Confederate Veteran, the official publication of the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, argued that “Theorists and imaginary philanthropists may indulge in vain speculation from now until doomsday about bringing up the negro race to a plane of equality with the white race” but “Whom God has parted asunder, no man can join together.” The author’s article maintained that “The kindliest relation that ever existed between the two races in this country, or that ever will, was the ante-bellum relation of master and slave.”

Southern racists in the 1950s and 1960s knew the true significance of the Confederate flag and adopted it as a symbol of their opposition to the civil rights movement. The Courier and Post of Charleston, SC in a recent article noted, “The battle flag was placed atop the Statehouse dome in 1962, at the outset of the modern civil rights movement in what some saw as a show of defiance against integration and voting rights that had been denied blacks since Reconstruction.” Governor George Wallace, who epitomized southern opposition to civil rights, raised the Confederate battle flag over the Alabama state capitol in 1963 to express his commitment to segregation, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

To defend the Confederate flag is to defend the shackles, whips and auction blocks of slavery. To fly this flag or wear it on an article of clothing proclaims one’s racism or advertises one’s abysmal ignorance of American history. There is no third possibility.

John J. Dunphy is the author of Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois and Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials: The Investigative Work of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, 1945–1947.