As the American Civil War recedes steadily into the past, disputes over the display of the symbols of the Confederacy, especially on public property, persist. Such a battle is developing in Texas.
Texas permits individuals and organizations to purchase specialty automobile license plates. Members of the Texas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans want to display a logo on their plates that includes the notorious Stars and Bars battle flag.
The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles rejected the SCV’s application. The group sued and a federal judge upheld the state’s position. The SCV appealed, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in its favor, holding that the group’s free speech rights had been violated.
Texas appealed the ruling, and this month the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in March.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans was founded in 1896 to commemorate and celebrate the Confederacy. The Stars and Bars battle flag is by far the most prominent image on its website; it can be purchased on coffee mugs, T-shirts and belt buckles.
But the website traffics in ideas, as well as flags. You can buy books such as “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem.” You discover that Abraham Lincoln was actually a white supremacist. You learn that, really, in many respects blacks were better off before emancipation.
Most important, you learn that the “War of Northern Aggression” wasn’t about slavery at all, but was a struggle to defend the rights of states and individuals.
Of course, the SCV has the right to promulgate these misguided notions. But one wonders why it wishes to force an image of its battle flag into such a publicly sanctioned place as a license plate, where it might cause in-your-face offense to a black citizen.
For that matter, some white Texans might cringe a little, too. My mother’s direct line of descent includes Francis Marion Hayes, a Texas frontier lawyer and state legislator. On March 7, 1860, he wrote to his brother: “I attended another negro sale yesterday. Negroes did not sell so high as they did the first of January. I bought one little boy about 10 years old for $1151.00, about as good a bargain as was sold on that day.”
F.M. Hayes had no doubts about the purpose of the Civil War. A year later, on March 14, 1861, he wrote to his father: “The election for the ratification or rejection of the Secession ordinance passed off quietly; the people manifesting great determination, but little excitement. The county stood as follows, for Secession 1149. Against 50. … I hope you and all my connection went for secession; for in that you voted for … maintenance of the institution of Slavery as it exists in the southern States: and against the enslaving of the white race.”
My slaveholding antecedents are too removed by time to cause me embarrassment or guilt. But they do call into question whether I’m the best person to say whether or not blacks should be offended by the celebration of the Confederacy on a state-sanctioned license plate.
That judgment should probably fall to the descendents of the 10-year-old boy who was sold in March 1860, but who, I hope, got his freedom a few years later, precisely because the Confederacy failed.
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