"[A]s a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or coloured race.” These are the words of William T. Thompson, designer of the American Confederate flag.
The Confederate flag was created during the start of the American Civil War, which spanned from 1861 to 1865. This war, which was paramount in American history, cemented the United States together as one nation and ended slavery in the South. President Abraham Lincoln pushed to end slavery, but several southern states defended their rights and wanted to secede from the United States.
In the Cornerstone Speech, delivered on 21 March 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens clearly defined the beliefs of the Confederate States when he said: “[O]ur new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Soon after this speech, the war began. It resulted in over 700,000 deaths.
The flag most people recognise as the “Confederate flag” was actually the battle flag, called the “Southern Cross”, and has never officially been a flag for the Confederate States. The official Confederate flag, called the “Stars and Bars”, looked too similar to the “Stars and Stripes” flag, causing confusion during battle. Instead, the battle flag was adopted and used during fights to distinguish the different sides. It became symbolic of the Confederacy after the war and is the flag that most people mean when they refer to the “Confederate flag”.
The debate around the Confederate flag is controversial, emotional and on-going. In the last couple of years, racism in America has been drawing more attention, with social movements like Black Lives Matter surfacing. Black Lives Matter was born out of the continued violence against African American citizens by the state, and gained new traction following the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Many deaths have been protested, including the nine lives lost after Dylann Roof’s brutal attack in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Images of Roof proudly posing with the flag have circulated on the internet and are a further indication that Roof’s attack was racially charged.
In his statement the day after the shooting, President Obama showed his sorrow and regret over the events, blaming America’s gun laws and stating that gun violence “doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency”.
This event in particular has sparked discussion about the Confederate flag again, both because of Roof’s motivations and because while the city mourned the death of nine innocent people, every flag outside the state house was respectfully flown at half-mast. That is, every flag but the Confederate flag.
Last month an activist, Bree Newsome, climbed the flagpole at the state house in South Carolina and took the Confederate flag down. While she was arrested and the flag was replaced, her actions were discussed on social media, with hashtags including #KeepItDown and #FreeBree emerging. Following Newsome’s actions, Rashad Robinson, the executive director of activist group ColourOfChange.org, said that the flag “sends a horrible message about what our country was and a reminder of what we can still be. The flag is down now, we should keep it down and any charges against these activists should be dropped immediately.”
South Carolina’s House of Representatives have now voted for the flag to be removed from the state house. South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley, who supported removal of the flag from the start, has signed the bill into state law. Many see this change as the first victory and a first step in the right direction. South Carolina is where the Civil War began because it was the first state to secede from the United States.
Those who support the flag argue that it is an inherent part of their heritage and culture which they should not have to abandon. For them, it symbolises a proud and united South challenging authority, not a racist worldview. A CNN poll revealed that 57 percent of Americans saw the flag as a symbol of Southerners’ pride in their heritage and not as a symbol of racism.
On 12 July, following the removal of the Confederate flag from the state house in South Carolina, an estimated 2000 people in their vehicles rallied, with participants sporting T-shirts that read “heritage, not hate” and waving Confederate flags to show their continued respect for the flag.
South Carolina State Senator Tom Davis posted a Facebook status arguing that the flag had been “misappropriated by hate groups as a symbol of their hatred” before going on to say that while he respects “those who proudly view this flag as a symbol of their heritage” they need to find a new way to honour that heritage.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is an association of male descendants of those who fought for the South in the Civil War. Many members of this group have spoken out in support of the Confederate flag. One such member, Chris Sullivan, told CNN that the flag is a “symbol of family and my ancestors who defended the state from invasion. It was about standing up to a central government.” Many of those defending the flag are not, from their perspective, defending slavery or racial subjugation. They are instead defending something they view as central to America’s values: freedom of expression and opposition to overbearing authority.
The University of Otago’s Dr Russell Johnson of the History Department said that it is “long overdue” for the flag to come down. Johnson explained that while it was incorporated into the Mississippi flag in 1894, the Confederate flag generally wasn’t flown after the war. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s that the flag came back. He said that this merely adds to the argument that the flag is a racist symbol of white dominance, as it was put up in response to the civil rights movement.
While most people would agree that the Civil War was over slavery, many argue that it was also over other factors such as state rights and economics. America is set up so that the individual states have a lot of freedom in terms of governing themselves. At the time, slavery was common practice and, while it was reducing throughout the world, it was still a part of American life. It was a big, but necessary, cultural shift for slavery to no longer be acceptable. So one motivation for the secession was that the southern states wanted to maintain their right to make their own calls and govern themselves. In terms of economics, slavery was a massive free labour force and made up a lot of the South’s economic power through the cotton trade. To let go of this advantage would cripple their economy, so they were reluctant to give it up.
Johnson said that no matter how you look at it, slavery is at the heart of the flag and the Civil War. Even when using the argument of states’ rights against a national rule, “the most important right they were trying to preserve was the legal right to own slaves”. Johnson also argued that even if you dismiss the history of slavery behind the flag, it is instead “a symbol of treason, of breaking up and destroying the United States”, and it symbolises a war in which hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives.
A lot of these arguments can be applied to the Nazi flag. One could argue that the swastika symbolises Germany taking back its native borders and bolstering its economy after the First World War. However, the Nazi flag is banned in many places throughout the world. Where it isn’t banned, it’s at the very least not socially acceptable — and it wouldn’t be displayed on government property. In Germany, any and all Nazi symbolism is prohibited completely in order to discourage any associated behaviour or attitudes. This is not a symbol people would defend with an argument of cultural heritage, even though the Nazi flag, and all things associated, had an impact worldwide.
We shouldn’t forget what Nazi Germany was, but we don’t ever want to appear to be celebrating it. So why is a symbol like the Confederate flag, which is inherently associated with racial subordination, violence and hate, defended? Dismissing and actively trying to forget the history associated with a symbol like the Confederate flag doesn’t help anyone. Taking the flag down from government property, and placing it in a museum where its past can be learned from, does.