June 22^nd

I guess South Carolina is going to take down the flag. Interesting that I don’t have to identify the flag, everyone knows the flag I’m talking about. The flag was little in evidence before 1948. That was when Harry Truman ran for re-election after desegregating the armed forces. This was a very unpopular move among our southern friends. They probably saw that desegregating the armed services was just the first step toward Brown vs Board of Education that would come just six years later. Separate but equal was rapidly dying and so was Jim Crow.

Southern politicians resisted; they formed the “Dixiecrat” party and the Confederate battle flag became their symbol. They waved this flag as they marched around the floor of the Democratic Convention in 1948 but Truman was nominated anyway. But they also had their own convention standing for state’s rights against the federal government’s intrusions, particularly on the issue of segregation. They even had their own nominee for President, Strom Thurmond, an ardent South Carolina segregationist. (It turns out that Strom Thurmond wasn’t all that rigorous about the separation of the races. He fathered a child by the sixteen year old black family maid.) As Joe E. Brown said as the final line in “Some Like it Hot,” “Nobody’s perfect.”

The battle flag continued as the symbol of southern resistance to integration and was also the symbol adopted by a variety of white supremacists from the Klan to the Christian Identity groups. A much more genteel group of flag folks is the “United Daughters of the Confederacy.” As you might imagine membership is open only to those who are descendants of men who fought for the Confederacy. One of their purposes is to keep alive the “lost cause” image of the ante-bellum south. This image includes slavery and is more informed by “Gone with the Wind” than by any realistic view of what really happened on those plantations.

Now, some 150 years after the war is over, South Carolina’s Governor Haley finally calls for the removal of this symbol of oppression. That is a good thing of course but we are removing a symbol, we aren’t removing what that symbol represents. Destroying the x-ray does not destroy the cancer.