Steve Earle on Mississippi and the Confederate battle flag

Steve Earle -- "Mississippi, It's Time" Southern Poverty Law Center 09/09/2015:

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 3: This is too perfect

It looks a lot like his heart

From Al Sharpton chides Dick Cheney over Confederate flag flap by Joe Gould and Dave Goldiner New York Daily News 10/30/07:

Nobody got shot, but Vice President Cheney still fired up controversy Monday when he went hunting at a private club that hangs the Confederate flag.

A Daily News photographer captured the 3-by-5 foot Dixie flag affixed to a door in the garage of the Clove Valley Gun and Rod Club in upstate Union Vale, N.Y. ...

Club officials threatened a reporter with arrest when he sought comment. ...

Cheney spokeswoman Lee Anne McBride said Cheney did not know anything about the controversy.

"The VP did not see the flag and neither did anyone on staff," said McBride. (my emphasis)

Confederate flag

The right symbol for today's Republican Party?

Thinking about the white supremacists supporting Brother Huck in the South Carolina primary because he loyally defends their official display of the Confederate battle flag, it occurred to me that the Republicans could easily remove this as an issue. They could just adopt the Confederate battle flag as the official Party symbol! Maybe they could overlay a picture of Abraham Lincoln's face on part of their flag with a "No" symbol over it to emphasize how far they've come from their ancient roots.

Johnny Irion and Sara Lee Guthrie have a song about the South Carolina Confederate state flag, called "Gervais". Gervais Street is in Columbia, South Carolina's state capital. In 2000, the Confederate battle flag (aka, the Beaureguard flag), symbol of slavery and treason, was relocated from from the State Capitol to a Confederate memorial site nearby on the Statehouse grounds. (See Confederate flag's last day over South Carolina Capitol CNN.com 06/30/2000.)

Still flying the flag upon Gervais
Was a battle flag now we can put it away
Still flying the flag upon Gervais
Was a battle flag, was a battle flag, was a battle flag
Was a battle flag, was a battle flag, we can put it away

Back in 2000, Mississippi had a public vote on whether to replace its 1894 state flag, which prominently features the Confederate battle flag design, with one that didn't. The Confederate state flag won. That was the only issue on the ballot for a special election. The Confederate version won with 65% of the vote. The returns clearly indicated that the voted divided heavily on racial lines, with whites voting even more overwhelmingly for it.

That contest provoked quite a bit of discussion at the time. Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham Alabama - The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution about her home time (and Condi Rice's), wrote about Mississippi's vote in, "Flag vote continues the quest for Dixie's soul" USA Today 04/17/2000 (I can't find an online link):

Mississippi white voters — four out of five of whom, according to a recent poll, will support the old flag — insist that they are motivated by the same historical memory that strummed my emotions as a child. But that romance of the loser is itself a delusion. For one thing, it ignores the experience of a sizable minority of the South's population, for whom the war represented, by contrast, a triumph: emancipation. And the fact that the hometown where I sorrowfully deplored the evils of slavery was the world's most segregated city outside Johannesburg, South Africa, suggests that Northern victory as well as Southern defeat was overrated. Indeed, the fight goes on and on.

It is, of course, a more recent war that Dixie's current last stand plainly echoes. The flag affray shares with the civil-rights drama of the 1960s a cast of characters as well as a central racial conflict ("white resistance to letting blacks change anything," as a retired Mississippi newspaper editor frames the current struggle). On one side are the "revolutionaries" — the civil-rights professionals and their increasingly commonplace bedfellow, a business establishment that abandoned its militant segregationist ideology as the farm-and-factory economy shifted to image-sensitive consumer services. The Mississippi Economic Council (the state Chamber of Commerce), buoyed by an unprecedented new contract with Nissan, almost single-handedly bankrolled the campaign for a new flag, featuring a former governor's laments that the hallowed stars and bars has been co-opted by the Klan and other white-supremacist groups.

The throwback racist organization leading the charge for the Confederate flag is the Council of Conservative Citizens. Powerful enough that Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., has been reluctant to repudiate his much-criticized ties to it, the CCC is a reincarnation of the White Citizens Councils, which were founded in 1954 as a discreet middle-class alternative to the Klan and dominated Mississippi politics throughout the 1960s.(my emphasis)

In this case, she may be giving too much credit to the White Citizens Council, because the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) were also very active in the pro-Confederate flag campaign. Also, calling the Council "discreet" is a very generous description. They have never made any secret of their racist and white supremacist views.

That business about the "romance of the loser" is also important. Rush Limbaugh's fans may be disproportionately white and male. But they often manage to imagine themselves to be a victimized minority. That doesn't mean others have to be sympathetic to their feeling. It's just a matter of understanding that psychological reference point. In my own experience, white Mississippians are the best in the world at whining about how persecuted they are. Maybe Serbians or Croatians are better at it, I don't know. But it's part of the segregationist mentality to which the Huck and the other Republican Presidential candidates have to appeal because it's now the core of their Party base.

McWhorter also writes:

There's an argument to be made that the South has not really lost the fight. Ever since Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 by the grace of a racially coded "Southern strategy," the Old Confederacy has been the electoral linchpin of the Republicans' domination of national politics. The Solid South that once repudiated the Republican Party of Lincoln has now turned just as monolithically away from the Democratic Party of Kennedy and Johnson, architects of the Second Emancipation. And powerful politicians — Attorney General John Ashcroft as well as [Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent] Lott (mum on the flag flap) - have pandered with impunity to extremist latter-day Southern secessionists. (my emphasis)

Add Brother Huck to the list.

She stated that well. This is the basic political fact about today's national Republican Party. It's most base is composed of conservative Southerners. I've been calling it "neosegregationist" for a while. But I'm starting to think that just plain old "segregationist" is a better name for it. Just look at the characters popping up in the Huck's campaign. Yikes!

McWhorter concluded, just before the Mississippi flag vote:

As a liberal-Democrat female who has lived "up North" for more than half of my life, I still define myself every day as a Southern-American. If Southernness is a condition, transcending reason as well as geography, the voters of Mississippi today have an opportunity to prove that it does not also have to be a sickness.

Oops! The Huck and his gaggle of segregationist fellow-travelers have raised a similar question. Brother Huck's friendly and kinda-goofy Gomer Pyle act shouldn't fool anyone.

Tags: authoritarianism, confederate flag, diane mcwhorter, mississippi politics, neo-confederate, neosegregation, segregation

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 30: The strange world of neo-Confederacy

Every year when I do this daily series of posts in April, I worry that I won't be able to find material to use. And every year I wind up thinking there was a lot of other stuff I intended to use but now the month's over.

I'll close this year's series with some comments about an article that appeared in the Biloxi Sun-Herald 04/12/01, during the Mississippi Confederate state flag campaign, Our flag was never intended to be a symbol of hate. Fly it proudly and change hearts instead. by Wallace Mason, "commander of Sam Davis Camp 596, Sons of Confederate Veterans". A copy of it is posted at FreeRepublic.com, the far-right Web site. I haven't checked it word for word against my hard copy, but it appears to be the same thing.

That title reminds me. One of the pitches that the partisans of the Confederate-themed flag used was that fighting over the flag was a distraction from more useful ways of promoting racial reconciliation. So after the election, I was expecting to see the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the League of the South and the White Citizens Council all getting together with the NAACP, the Urban League and other civil rights groups to protest police racial profiling, help enforce anti-discrimination laws, campaign for better public services, have meetings across the state to promote better understanding among the races, stuff like that.

But, darn, for some reason I just never heard about any of that stuff happening. I wonder why?

Mason, who called the Civil War the "War for Southern Independence", recites a pretty broad range of neo-Confederate slogans: only black bigots oppose the Confederate flag; slavery was not the cause of the war, oh, no, not at all; slavery would have faded away peacefull if those damnyankees hadn't forced reluctant Southerners into a war; greedy damnyankees wanted to force a tariff on the South and that had something or other to do with the war; the Emancipation Proclamation was no big deal and didn't do much for the slaves; the slaves just luu-uuved their Massas; lots and lots and lots of blacks served in the Confederate armed forces, I mean, they were totally enthusiastic about fighting for the Confederacy; not many Confederate soldiers owned slaves so how could the war have anything to do with slavery?; the South was deeply, passionately committed to the abstract principle of State Rights and so they had to secede from the Union because the damnyankees were threatening that but it had nothing to do with slavery (did I mention that already?); Southerners wanted lower taxes, too; the Confederacy stood for Honor and Duty and other fine Southern stuff like that.

I particularly like this part:

[The Confederate-themed state flag] was there as the 1950s closed and
the 1960s began, ushering in the turmoil of segregation and integration and
people marching for freedom. Our flag represents all people. Flower power and
the hippie generation and free love were all a part of Mississippi. Our flag was
there when its sons and daughters were sent to the jungles of Vietnam, a
political fiasco that would cost the lives of young men and women, white, black
and Indian, before their time.

Yes, folks, the Confederate flag represents hippies and flower power. (I wish I had known about all the free love around when I lived there!) And it represents civil rights marches against integration.

Now, you're probably thinking, how can anyone offer up a steaming pile of horse-poop like this and expect anyone to take it seriously?

Because, except for those few whose brains have been completely fried by OxyContin or other intoxicants, they don't take it seriously. Neo-Confederate hokum isn't history, neo-Confederate routine is not really about history. It's a political ideology, whose main purpose so far as I can see is to sneer at black people and generally promote authoritarian attitudes. The history just serves as window-dressing to provide slogans and symbols. Like with Holocaust denial, at a basic level it's meant to be a sneer rather than anything serious, for all its pretensions at scholarly trappings. Hey, 93,000 black people fought for the Confederacy! Translate that into what comes through to Rush Limbaugh fans after the words are processed through a heavy OxyContin filter, and it means, "Yuck, yuck, even n*****s fought for the Confederacy, haw haw!"

This is the kind of white folks' that is the heart of neo-Confederacy, from Mason's article, with added commentary in brackets:

And what will the new flag represent? Will it represent those [bad black people] who constantly complain of racism and their remembrance of slavery? Will it represent those[white] businessmen who are worried about the dollar bill or image? Will this new flag represent all those [white] Mississippians who have sacrificed so much in order for us to enjoy what we have today? The new flag would represent absolutely nothing [good from the viewpoint of white supremacists].

Our [white people's] state flag and the Confederate battle flag are symbols of our [the white people in our] region and [white] Southern heritage. That heritage is a culture of contributions from white, black, American Indian and an increasing number of races. [Yuck, yuck, yeah, you know we're real mul-ti-cul-tural at the Sons of Confederate Veterans] As [white] Southerners, we are going to have to do a better job of protecting our heritage [heritage of the white race] because tomorrow it will be our [white bigots'] very freedom.

Those [bad black people] who attack our [white people's] state flag are the ones being intolerant and racist. No one is attacking their [worthless black] heritage. Tolerance has to to work both ways [yuck, yuck, we're real tolerant of black folks as long as they know their place], but, for [white bigors in] the South, that is not happening. Southern [white people's] heritage is being removed for the sake of appeasement and compromise [with bad black people] that will lead only to more compromise [with bad black people].

Yesterday, I quoted a neo-Confederate article from the San Francisco Chronicle that referred to "60,000 and 90,000 black men, both free and slave" who allegedly did something vaguely defined as having "served under the banner of the Stars and Bars," by which he means the Confederate flag. Mason's article says:

Black soldiers did serve in the Confederate army and navy. Professor Ed Smith, director of American Studies at American University, calculates that between 60,000 and 93,000 blacks served the Confederacy in some capacity. They served, not to stay as slaves, but so there would be a better future for them.

Another vague formulation, "served the Confederacy in some capacity". Like, what, being a slave cook at a plantation where a few Confederate cavalrymen stopped by to have lunch one day? As I said yesterday, the notion that any significant number of black, free or slave, served as Confederate soldiers is a favorite claim of neo-Confederates, but it's not true. If this figure about black who "served the Confederacy in some capacity" is true in some sense (though I doubt it's true in any sense), both this article and the one in the Chronicle on Sunday use it to imply with technically saying so that these were soldiers. This kind of thing is thought by crackpot writers to be cagey and clever, though it's really just dissembling and slippery.

There is an Edward C. Smith in the American Studies program at American University. I'll have to follow up on that particular claim later.

Neo-Confederacy: a bottomless pit of nonsense. And of maudlin phrases about "heritage".

Tags: neo-confederate, confederate heritage month 2007, confederate flag

More on Dean and That Flag

I'll post some additional comments later. But I'm providing a couple of links on the Dean flag issue. This is from Emory Walker at Daily Kos. This part I like:

The notion that confederate flag-bearing, gun-toting truck drivers make up the better part of that [Southern white working-class] population is nonsense--the kind only a carpetbagging yankee could conjure. That is why that phraseology will ultimately come back to haunt Dr. Dean. There is a New South, and it looks nothing like cotton plantations and tent revivals.

This part is off the mark:

I argue here that the chief causus belli [in the Civil War] was not slaveholding per se but rather the question of the right to secede. Only the leadership of Abraham Lincoln finally brought an end to this vital historical debate. It is worth noting that Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves as his first act; instead, that was nearly his last act in the Civil War. Ken Burns described it as an effort to "ennoble" an unpopular war. At that moment, citizens of northern cities were busy
lynching black freemen and rioting against the draft. ...

In that sense, I am with Gov. Dean, who at one point argued that the confederate flag was a states' rights issue. Those in the old Union states who would offer their opinions on this: Thank y'all, but we'll settle this on our own schedule.

This from Hesiod is also good (scroll down to "BLOCK THE VOTE"):

[Dean's flag remark] may not hurt him much in the early primary states, but it will kill him in the South.

The "confederate" voters will avoid him in droves, and he will turn off black voters. All the
voters heard was his original statement. Very few of them heard his detailed
explanations, or the context.