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.
It takes a 2/3 vote to lower the flag, but it takes a 50% vote to repeal the law requiring a 2/3 vote to lower the flag.
If all of the Democratic legislators in South Carolina vote to repeal the SC Heritage Bill, only 6 Republican senators and 17 Republican representatives are required to have that repeal pass.
Gov. Nikki Haley can then consign that flag to a museum as the “last flag” and be done with that issue.
The thing about racism and racist intimidation is that it thrives on fear of what other people are thinking. The fact is that racial tension in South Carolina is scaring the bejeepers out of Bush’s campaign and Cruz’s campaign to the point they made an early waffling statement, shows that this is a litmus issue for the Hispanics that these two Republicans were counting on.
It is scaring the businesses that might have to deal with further boycotts or loss of out-of-state investors and also the state business development and relocation office.
Which way will the wind blow for those 23 Republicans who could make a difference? The state senators have lost one of their own; despite party differences, that has an impact.
The legislature has been sufficiently pro-flag to keep the law in existence. The law was a promise of a Republican gubernatorial candidate, and it got anchored to the Republicans and enough of their base are rabid enough to, in the absence of events like Charleston, to use it as a bogus litmus test for “conservatism”. Who is afraid and who is actually a bigot best shows up in their campaign contributions. The business wing of the party does not require obvious connections with the Council of Conservative Citizens. More marginal candidates who are raising the rabble do. For the business class, it’s a trivial thing–except when it isn’t.
As for reflection of the citizenry, 32% are non-white of which 28% are black. That leaves only 19% swing in opinion among whites. I can’t find any statistic that tells the proportion of the total population who are white Democrats. On the flag issue, based on the not-so-random sample of my friends, I suspect that 60% of the population all races wants to see this irritant go, for another 20% it’s a trivial issue, and the remaining 20% are the folks who want to see it stay as heritage or to keep the offense there.
Ancestors in great numbers did die in that war, and their descendants are still working through how to own that. More disturbing are the folks who did not have ancestors in the Civil War but have appropriated the symbols of the Confederacy as expressions of white supremacy.
It persists because the academic community and the business community (that is, the state elites) tolerate it or themselves encourage it.
Which reminds me, what have Ben Carson and Alan Keys said about Charleston? Tim Scott has been quiet as a mouse. And Gov. Haley assigned two black SC Highway Patrol officers to guard the Confederate flag on the state house grounds. Hostage much?
Thanks for very helpful comment. As far as owning it goes, I find impressive how Will Harris owns his heritage (White Oak Pastures that I referred you to the link some months back), a heritage with a trajectory (he doesn’t get all explicit about that but it’s there). White Oak is GA, so not quite the heart of secessionism that SC is.
http://www.whiteoakpastures.com/
Georgia was as much at the heart of secessionism as other states. The capital was in Milledgeville then; Atlanta was a newly burgeoning railroad hub of 5000 people. Sherman was out to destroy railroad logistics by burning Atlanta. He was out to destroy the place of the Secession Convention by torching Columbia, and the firing platform for the attack on Fort Sumter by occupying Charleston.
Clay County GA is a majority-black county, which means that it was in the 1850s a part of the old plantation belt that is now the remaining Democratic strongholds in the South. In the 1970s, Clay County was one of the south Georgia counties that was beginning to move beyond the fight against desegregation and moving forward with impressively desegregated school. (They really could not afford dual systems and 10 years after the Civil Rights movement there were some impressive and well-trained black teachers who came back home to serve their home communities like Bluffton and Fort Gaines. It was rural. Rural schools bused. Then came Reagan’s nonsense. And the religious segregation academies. I don’t know how any of that has played out in Clay County since I was there in the 1970s.
fascinating, thanks.
Wow, I am impressed Tarheel Dem. I know that region primarily from traveling through it when relatives lived across the river in Alabama. Interesting geography and interesting history. Quite poor, really. Clay joined with Randolph County to build one high school, integrated, for both underpopulated counties. We drove by that high school every time we drove that route into Alabama. Did that merger of schools happen while you were there?
There probably is a mostly white private/relgious school there now. The county south of there, Early County, is filled with some other quite racist extended family members. At least their posts on Facebook sorta give the game away. I pushed back on an anti-Obama screed by an otherwise nice cousin a few years ago and soon found myself unfriended. Part of the reason I don’t do politics at all on Facebook. Not worth the grief.
I was doing field organizing work in southwest Georgia in 1978. Most of the counties in that region had a single county high school and often a single elementary school as well.
Well, we all have to be circumspect in posting to our Facebook friends these days. Family members are hard, especially when they have to excommunicate you so their friends don’t know they are talking to someone who hangs out at the frog pond. The culture in the South, especially in the more traditional South, polices the thoughts of the members of its communities.
So very true; even holds true in locales that might be considered cities, depending on the circles one moves in. Politics is tribal and it’s certainly more difficult to hold differing views from the majority (with whom one shares skin color) here in the South.
hope you read the link for White Oak Pastures – that’s one thing that’s going on there.
“I am a racist traitor and/or am extremely stupid.” That’s what that flag says.
When I was a kid I bought myself what was called at the time a surfer’s cross. It turned out to be an Iron Cross, the Nazi symbol. My father, who served in WWII, asked me, “Do you know what that stands for?” Lesson learned.
When you display a symbol it means more than what it means to you. It means what it means to the rest of the world. You might be ignorant of what it means until you learn. Once you know you are embracing the meaning.
Another little footnote.
From 1865 to 1962, it wasn’t flown from the Statehouse. Be interesting to report where it was outside of the Statehoouse Civil War Relice Room (what passed for a museum – a few flags displays of uniforms – based on my memories from the early 1950s.)
From 1865 to 1962, it wasn’t flown from the Statehouse.
And what was happening around 1962?
The Greensboro sit-ins began February 1, 1960.
The Council of Racial Equality and the Stundent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began Freedom Rides to desegregate intercity buses in May 1961. That’s when John Lewis first was attacked, in Rock Hill SC. In 1962, SCLC adopted a direct action strategy in Albany, GA. And many local chapters tried to copy as best they could what the more active places were doing. For example, I think that it was in 1962 that the Greenville SC County Library was quietly desegregated after the threat of a sit-in.
Oh, yes, the Confederate resurgence was big culturally in the South, ramping up after Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott and going into overdrive under the cover of the Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965.
Welcome to the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction. Some of us hope that this time we finally get it right and put the stake through the dark heart of the slavers.
The war is over — if you want it.
Bipartisan group of Charleston are politicians calls for lowering of Confederate flag.
The folks to watch are Lexington County politicians, a large delegation that represents the area where Dylann Roof grew up. Gov. Haley used to be one of them. Will she or can she twist arms?
I say make it open season on traitors. See someone wearing/waving/flying that flag? Put a bullet between their eyes (or center mass if you’re more of a distance shooter). $500 per kill. #OnlySlightlyKidding
From Facebook, an event announcement that I found interesting.
I think it is a brilliant move to offer the Revolutionary War memorializing state flag as the banner to say “We are United” as the governor moves to remove the Confederate flag from official sanction.
The state flag memorializes the Battle of Fort Moultrie in which a palmetto fort absorbed British cannon balls and as a result held the entrance to Charleston harbor (at least that first time).
However, watch in 5…4…3…2…1 that:
If we get to Friday with the flag taken down and none of the garbage I predicted above interrupting it, the We Are United effort might be worth something. Otherwise, it’s another “We Love Ferguson” move intended to unify whites without making changes.
We will see.
At 4 pm Gov.Haley and Sen. Graham are going hold a joint presser and urge to legislature to take the flag down.
I wonder how many in the south will take the time to clean up their social media. Delete all those photos with flag and their favorite Bushmaster.
That’s the harder job. It’s much easier to do when governments aim for peace and prosperity and succeed well enough for people to be more relaxed about issues.
And the list of GOP pols rushing to call for the same thing is growing.
So far:
Ben Carson
Jeb Bush
Sen. Bob Corker.
The Post and Courier is reporting that Sen. Tim Scott will be joining Haley and Graham in calling for the removal of the Confederate flag.
Here’s a clip when the Confederate flag in SC was an issue in a presidential debate. It’s 15 years ago, and maybe the most remarkable reaction is the crowd reaction to the suggestion that the state get rid of the flag.
http://tinyurl.com/qzdhp3o
Maybe that’s why Rodney Smolla decided to give up the fight.
But maybe times have changed.
Where a few US rebels fled — The Confederate South Still Lives, In Brazil.
I started a comment.
It grow’d. Just like Topsy.
Now a standalone post.
A New AMERICAN Flag Is What Is Really Needed Here!!!
Read on.
In good health.
And…have a nice, nice day!!!
Really.
Later…
AG
Greaat ..
Tolak Reklamasi
Teluk Benoa
Teluk Benoa
You can hear it already: What difference does it make? Who cares, really? It won’t change anything. You think the next mass killer will give a flying fig?
When you hear these sentiments (or something like them), go back and read the original post where men of good conscience thought to do something about the confederate flag’s prominent and state-sanctioned display on the capitol grounds. While they found a lot of agreement, they were also told to forget about changing anything: Was it worth your job to fight this battle which you would surely lose? Smolla and Barker both weighed themselves in that balance, and found themselves wanting.
Now it appears that political momentum has swung towards removal of the flag. Republican elected officials – always sensitive to the political winds – have decided that they can take the chance of offending unreconstructed racists, and are coming out in favor of removing the flag. Yes, it’s a timid coming out. Yes, it’s itty-bitty baby steps. But that flag will be gone by Labor Day.
I’m still going to feel good about it, even if it doesn’t really accomplish anything.