Imagine that you’re the president of a university in South Carolina and your athletic department comes to you and tells you that your state is never going to host any part of a basketball tournament or pretty much any other kind of NCAA-sanctioned postseason event because the goddamned Confederate Flag is still flying in the capital. Maybe you might want to use whatever influence that you imagine that you have to get that flag taken down. That’s what happened with former Furman University president Rodney Smolla, but it wasn’t long before he was dissuaded from pursuing the matter. It turned out, it was more of a headache with fewer chances for success than he first imagined:
Naively, I was buoyed with optimism. Then reality set in. I began to explore the issue more seriously with a few select South Carolina leaders, all of whom privately expressed the view that the flag should go. However, I was counseled that getting it down was politically impossible. I was particularly moved by Jim Barker, who was then president of Clemson, and who had bravely participated in a civil rights march in his early years as that university’s president to urge taking the flag down from the Capitol dome. Everyone I talked to told me the same thing: Good luck, bless you for trying, it’s the right thing to do, but it will never happen. A rock-solid majority of the South Carolina General Assembly was absolutely opposed to removing the flag. No political leader in the state could dare buck that force. To do so would be to face political annihilation. In the press of other events and issues, I let the flag issue slip to my back burner.
I look back at that now with deep regret. I’ve since left the state for a new job in Delaware. It’s not an issue I thought I’d ever be addressing again. Until this week.
You know, sometimes a small minority can get their political way if they are organized and motivated enough, and in many instances I don’t think that this is a bad thing. I’m just not sure how organized the pro-flag crowd has really been in South Carolina. Here we have an example from the last decade in which two well-intentioned university presidents were convinced that trying to remove the flag was a suicide mission. Were they right? Was their opposition really quite that powerful?
Maybe they gave them too much credit. Or, maybe, it wasn’t really necessary for the pro-flag groups to put much pressure on the politicians because the politicians were largely pro-flag themselves?
Whenever I read articles about this issue, and I’ve been reading them since this was a hot issue during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, I see that business leaders and academics and even some members of the legislature will privately say that the flag is divisive and should be taken down. But they always point at the overwhelming political support for the flag as a reason that they can’t or couldn’t do anything about it.
I don’t dispute that the legislature has been rabidly pro-flag. I only question why they have been so. Was it an honest reflection of the sentiments of the citizenry? Was it a result of a particularly effective grassroots campaign?
I don’t really think that either of those scenarios were true. I think that the legislature was dominated by conservatives and conservatives in South Carolina don’t care even a little bit what the business community or the academic community or the citizenry at large think about anything if it interferes with their racist worldview.
We’re about the get another test of my theory. We’ll see how it goes.
