Heritage, like a sword, often has more than one sharp edge. That should be realized as the risen-again debate about all things Confederate shows no sign of abating.
Legacy is often a peculiar, one-sided thing, especially in the long-diverse Southland. It’s a timely topic this holiday weekend, as the Declaration of Independence pledges: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… .”
The South, and the North, have both stumbled across the centuries in making liberty’s powerful promise apply equally to all.
The Charleston church murders and other tragic incidents continue to show the bloody price of this installment plan toward freedom isn’t yet marked “Paid in Full.”
It would be disingenuous toward history, and disharmonious, to not count the South’s Civil War casualties somewhere among this ongoing, awful toll. Their memory is why the passage of 150 years hasn’t dimmed the passionate embrace of the Confederate Battle Flag and its ilk.
No one who’s spent even an hour in the South can feasibly believe that Dixie’s old banners will vanish anytime soon from bumper stickers of unreconstructed believers.
Owing to recent events, it’s now an open question, though, as to the future of the various iterations of Rebel flags found on license plates or officially flapping above public spaces and monuments.
Georgia, and other affected states, must be prepared to fully entertain the coming tough conversations. The old reply of “It’s Heritage, not Hate” is increasingly inadequate for a modern South.
The argument for keeping the Confederacy’s flags — or their close cousins — flying at several states’ behest in the 21st century makes a tragic mistake of glorifying a widely discredited part of Southern history. Is the defeated cause truly the most important aspect of both our history and present? If it’s not, then the tired arguments for the status quo grow more specious with each sunset.
Yet, it’s a free country still. So the old flags can certainly keep their place on t-shirts and front porches. To my mind, there’s also no real harm in their continuing to fly over Confederate veterans’ cemeteries that are a nod to an undeniable past. And weathered stone monuments to the Gray team’s generals should remain as sentinels to yesteryear. Vandals who deface them do as much harm to history and right as do those who refuse to see the horror and repression that these same flags of sectional uprising also represent to so many.
Heritage really is bound by the experiences and history of the beholder. And there’s more than one narrative surrounding the symbols that are the confederacy’s flags. For many, the banners improperly lord themselves over still-harsh history lessons.
Which explains the clangor of recent days as the Old South somersaults in its grave, seemingly eager to do battle with its more-worthy modern successor.
Heritage, not hate. Here’s a little of what that concept means for me personally.
When my age numbered in single digits, my grandmother, born in 1890s Mississippi, astounded me by remarking that “the Civil War wasn’t that long ago.” She didn’t talk much about her Southern upbringing – many African-Americans of her era didn’t.
Framed in a hallway of my home, though, is her faded green, 1951-dated railroad travel pass, which has “(Col)” after her name. That’s “colored,” not “colonel.” The passes of white employees and spouses weren’t so marked.
Heritage in my wife’s extended family means never forgetting her great-grandfather, a Texas slave whose industry enabled him to purchase his own freedom, and that of his wife and children. Emancipation papers in hand, he turned an ox-drawn wagon due North and never looked back until his family reached the free state of Kansas.
And history came to life for me at age 13, when a church convention’s youth rally settled in at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. On a small plaque near the sanctuary organ was a monument to four young girls murdered in 1963 by a segregationist’s dynamite bomb. Heritage, not hate.
That waving battle flag comes to mind when I remember a college-era summer job in 1981 and the old woman in Meridian, Miss., who said flatly that she could not rent a room to me “because she didn’t have separate bathrooms for coloreds.” Heritage, not hate.
Ditto for the diehards in mid-century Columbus, Ga., who refused to feed my uncle, a U.S. Navy sailor in uniform who was traveling aboard a Korean War-era troop train.
Those episodes represent the worst of the Old South. They clash in many minds against today’s much-changed South.
There’s the conservative, white former neighbor of mine with a McCain-Palin bumper sticker who called me not long after I’d arrived in Atlanta to say that my mother-in-law had stumbled and fallen into a ditch while walking to meet my daughter’s school bus. He helped her back into our house, bandaged the cuts on her face and stuck around until I got there.
Then there was the old white gentleman who began a conversation with me during a vacation to Tennessee and Virginia some 15 years ago. Remarking that he was reared under segregation’s rigidity, he volunteered that “It never made any difference to me – colored or white. For when we get to heaven, we’ll all be the same.”
“You’ve got a point there, sir,” I agreed at the time. I feel the same way today.
That’s the South at its not-uncommon modern best. As a region, we’ve moved a good ways toward reaching a better place for all. The coming battle over the Rebel flag proves we’ve got a long ways to go yet.
Making heritage mean anything more than a trite bumper sticker sentiment will be never-ending work, as succeeding generations grapple with what history meant then and now. That won’t happen if we’re too blindly stubborn to consider experiences other than our own.
Heritage, not hate must somehow make its peace with the logo found on coins in our pockets. E. Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One.
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