ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Lord, where did Bree Newsome get the nerve to climb 30 feet to remove that flag?
Girlfriend must have some pretty strong legs and arms.
When it comes to snakes and height, I’m pure chicken. For real.
But Newsome didn't wait to do what South Carolina's politicians should've already done. No, Newsome was like if you want something done, do it yourself.
“Enough is enough,” she told us.
Enough with all the back and forth about what the Confederate flag means and doesn’t. Enough about whether it’s appropriate and where.
The flag has been at the center of a hot debate since it showed up in a photo with alleged gunman Dylann Roof in the wake of a deadly shooting last month at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Roof is charged with shooting and killing nine of Emanuel's members, including its pastor, after they welcomed him into a Bible study session.
Activists across the country have been arguing for the flag’s permanent removal from Statehouse grounds ever since.
Dan Coleman, spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said he thinks a little education about Southerners and Southern symbols would help defray tensions surrounding the emblem.
“I understand why people are uncomfortable with it,” Coleman said. “But the flag isn’t a governmental flag nor does it suggest support for slavery. It was the soldiers’ flag and we honor the soldiers, our ancestors who fought and died under that banner.”
Newsome, 30, said in television interviews that “It’s time to reconcile ourselves with the past and move forward into a better future where everyone has equal rights.”
Even though Georgia removed the emblem from its state flag nearly 15 years ago, the small 2014 kerfuffle over a specialty license plate design submitted by the Georgia chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans remains.
Gov. Nathan Deal seems to be as lost in the delusion of the Confederate flag as "Gone With the Wind."
Although he said he’s “not closing the door” on the issue, Deal said “we have to be cautious that we don’t get caught up on a sweep of emotion here and fail to recognize the heritage that is associated with these symbols.”
Coleman said his organization has asked for a meeting with Deal about the license plate but maintains the Confederate emblem has nothing to do with hatred. It’s all about honoring Southern heritage.
But even people whose family has lived here since before the Revolutionary War argue this isn’t about Confederate heritage.
“The flag represents the desire for states’ rights — but only the right to have slaves and deny people basic rights,” one reader said.
Jay Scott, of Atlanta, said it’s time to be honest about the root of “Confederate heritage.”
“Georgia’s article of secession is entirely about slavery and the failure of Northern states to support slavery,” he said. “Even referring to the years 1860-1960s as ‘Jim Crow’ is a sugar-coating. Jim Crow, after all, was a caricature created by a performer wearing blackface — crude and insensitive, but not physically harmful. But those years were brutal.”
And any argument to the contrary is just about as disturbing as the one about black people being happy to be slaves.
I remember the first time my daughter read about slavery.
“Why did they do that to us?” she asked me.
Even at the age of 8, she knew there was something inherently wrong in that system; that no happiness could be found in being property, of living under a whip, of someone selling off your family.
Slavery was the central point of contention in the Civil War. And the Confederacy wanted to preserve that institution.
Even after it was abolished, some Southern states like Georgia continued slavery in places like the Chattahoochee Brick Company and Sloss Coal. Read it in detail in Douglas A. Blackmon’s “Slavery by Another Name.”
Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of World War II, millions of African-Americans were forced into the South’s new forms of coerced labor. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, they were then sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations.
That’s quite a heritage.
The sons and daughters of the Confederate veterans should be able to fly that banner all they want, but should everyone else have to accept its place on state buildings?
Maybe that’s why Bree Newsome climbed that flagpole and took it down. Only it didn’t last long. State officials were quick to raise the Confederate banner again and charge Newsome and a fellow activist with defacing a monument. If convicted, she faces up to a $5,000 fine and three years in prison.
On Saturday, there were more protests by the South Carolina NAACP. And this week, the South Carolina Senate voted to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds, and it sent the proposal to the state’s House of Representatives.
Let’s hope South Carolina does the right thing. Let’s hope Georgia does, too.
