Eugene Robinson: “This emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down”

July 10, 2015 JanF Featured Posts, News and Opinion 9

Eugene Robinson, son of South Carolina, on today’s removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds:

For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down. […]

In the South, William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t even past. The flag represented, for some white South Carolinians, a past that was invented out of whole cloth — a past in which something other than slavery was the cause of a conflict Southerners called the “War Between the States.”

In truth, the Civil War only was about states’ rights in the sense that the Confederate states feared losing one specific “right” — to own human beings and compel their labor. No amount of Spanish moss can obscure this basic fact. No paeans to the valor of Confederate soldiers can change the fact that they were fighting for slavery.

And no amount of revisionist claptrap can change the fact that the flag was hoisted at the capitol in Columbia in 1961 and kept flying not to honor some gauzy vision of Southern valor but to resist the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. The flag meant whites-only schools, whites-only public accommodations, whites-only voter rolls. It represented white power and privilege over subjugated African Americans. It was used by the murderous terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan — and by an ignorant young white supremacist who allegedly took nine innocent lives at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

… it still took hours of contentious debate, but the House passed the bill around 1 a.m. and Haley signed it into law Thursday afternoon.

Rep. Jenny Horne (R) makes impassioned plea to vote to remove the flag

Eugene Robinson continues …

It was an acknowledgment, in the state where the Civil War began, that the South lost not only the war but also the battle to rewrite history. […]

The flag is more important, though, because of the way it has been used — not just as an instrument of repression but also as a way to deny history and thus avoid history’s judgments and responsibilities. What South Carolina’s governor and legislature have announced is clear: It’s time, finally, to stop pretending.

Symbols matter. South Carolina should have brought down the Confederate battle flag long ago, but I’m proud that my home state is doing it now.

We should all join Eugene Robinson in being glad the flag is gone and agree with his sentiment that it was long overdue.

But the people who are lionizing Gov. Nikki Haley (R) for her “courage” need to remember that her state had this conversation not too long ago when the NCAA banned South Carolina from hosting postseason tournaments because of that flag. It only became important because the business people that she early on insisted “did not care about the flag” all of a sudden started caring. “Courage” in the face of lost business is not a Glorious New Day for South Carolina, it is Republican hypocrisy.

Now, how about making some less symbolic changes and addressing the issues from pre-massacre Charleston, issues like segregation and integration highlighted in this CNN video: Being black in Charleston

Transcript

And while tourists know Charleston as a city rich in history and southern charm, some local would say tell you that southern charm is hiding deep-seated racial tensions.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIAM BILL SAUNDERS, FOUNDER, COMMITTEE ON BETTER RACIAL ASSURANCE: You would believe that everything is going smoothly, that it’s all just so neat and everybody is just so nice and it’s the best place to be. Most people that come here got no idea how Charleston functions. Dogs got a hell of a lot more rights in Charleston than black people have. Everybody looking out for their dogs and cats, but there is no protection at all for blacks.

My name is William Bill Saunders and I am really a troublemaker in the Charleston area, making sure that people get a chance to take a look at what’s going on.

I think that right now we got so many enemies all over the world, yet the most important fight we got is on segregation and integration.

RICHARD DESHIELDS, CHARLESTON RESIDENT: Charleston is great for tourists because they love they tourists, but if you’re black in Charleston, it’s not a good place to be.

WILLIAM PUGH, CHARLESTON HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: I feel like Charleston, it’s a great place to live, I love living here, but there definitely are a lot of underlying issues that we have. And unfortunately they’re just not talked about.

JOHN DAVID ANDREWS, CHARLESTON RESIDENT: It’s a beautiful place with a lot of history, and you only see that. You see the glitz and the glamour, and everything else is literally pushed to the other side of town.

SAUNDERS: I would never go straight home or I would go through a park or a yard somewhere, because I always felt like somebody might be waiting to kill me. And those are the kind of thoughts that I have been through for so long. PUGH: I feel like this problem can be fixed many ways. It starts with my generation stepping up to the plate and saying we’re not going to put up with this. Our grandparents might have, our parents might have, but it’s time for us to really buckle down, sit down, talk, and fix some things.

SAUNDERS: One of the things that I wanted to be all my life, since I was about 12, 13 years old, is to be a man — not a black man, I wanted to be a man. There’s no way ever be a man in Charleston, South Carolina. I would always be a boy to the system.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

How about removing not just the “emblem of hatred” but the effects from the policies promoted by 150 years of institutionalized racism. The people of South Carolina are waiting.

9 Comments

  1. Let’s hope that Eugene Robinson is right and that “the South lost not only the war but also the battle to rewrite history.”

    You can never learn the lessons from a history you refuse to acknowledge.

  2. NY Times BREAKING NEWS email:

    South Carolina Lowers Confederate Flag and an Era Ends
    Friday, July 10, 2015 10:11 AM EDT

    Closing a chapter on a symbol of the Deep South and its history of resistance and racial animus, South Carolina on Friday lowered the Confederate battle flag from outside its State House, where it had flown for more than 50 years.

    The flag came down amid heavy security at a Friday morning event that followed days of emotional debate in the Legislature and, on Thursday, the final approval of Gov. Nikki R. Haley, who had pledged that the symbol would be lowered “with dignity.”

    Shielded across the decades by both Democrats* and Republicans, the flag left its pole outside the State House only 23 days after nine black churchgoers were killed at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

    *The NY Times needs to learn a little history as well.

    The “Democrats” who shielded the flag were the Southern Democrats who left the party after the Civil Rights laws were passed in the early 1960s and who are now Republicans. Their standard bearer was South Carolina Governor (later Senator) Strom Thurmond who ran as a Dixiecrat in 1948:

    Southern Democrats had become increasingly disturbed over President Truman’s support of civil rights, particularly following his executive order racially integrating the U.S. armed forces and a civil rights message he sent to Congress in February 1948. At the Southern Governor’s Conference in Wakulla Springs, Florida, on February 6, Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright proposed the formation of a new third party to protect racial segregation in the South. On May 10, 1948, the governors of the eleven states of the former Confederacy, along with other high-ranking Southern officials, met in Jackson, Mississippi, to discuss their concerns about the growing civil rights movement within the Democratic Party. At the meeting, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond criticized President Truman for his civil rights agenda, and the governors discussed ways to oppose it.[33]

    The Southern Democrats who had walked out of the Democratic National Convention to protest the civil rights platform approved by the convention, and supported by Truman, promptly met at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 17, 1948, and formed yet another political party, which they named the States’ Rights Democratic Party. More commonly known as the “Dixiecrats”, the party’s main goal was continuing the policy of racial segregation in the South and the Jim Crow laws that sustained it.

    This is the same Strom Thurmond that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) once said should have been elected president because it would have “saved a lot of trouble”, you know, black folks gettin’ civil rights that might one day lead to uppity black people gettin’ elected president and stuff.

  3. Here is a link to the flag lowering video from CSPAN-3:

    July 10, 2015 South Carolina Flag Ceremony

    (Coverage starts at about 00:50 into the clip, Gov. Haley arrives at 04:00, ceremony begins at 06:58 with a color guard (state troopers? one is black), flag starts coming down at 09:18, at 09:45 it is removed … crowd chants USA USA then starts singing na na na na hey hey good bye … the black trooper is handed the folded flag to take it off the State Capitol grounds where it is handed to a white guy who looks like Colonel Sanders)

    • The state newspaper reports that the flag came down at 10:09am Eastern.

      The flag is officially down:

  4. President Obama:

    President Obama ‏@POTUS

    South Carolina taking down the confederate flag – a signal of good will and healing, and a meaningful step towards a better future.

  5. Maybe the South will finally rejoin the Union. But I’m not holding my breath.

  7. Apparently there is a Jefferson Davis Highway in Northern Virginia and there is a move afoot to have it renamed:

    “One hundred and fifty years of mollifying supporters of the Confederacy is enough,” said Diane Duston, a real estate agent in Arlington whose week-old petition has garnered more than 500 signatures. “We’re through with what the Confederacy stood for.”

    The United Daughters of the Confederacy lobbied fiercely back at the beginning of the last century for highways to honor the president of sedition. They have been responsible for many of the Confederate monuments to secession and white supremacy, under the guise of honoring their ancestors.

    The Sons of the Confederacy spokesman said that it is “cultural genocide” to rename it and that people should not just erase “4 years of history.” Er, you don’t lose the history … you just stop honoring white supremacist traitors. Does the absence of an Adolph Hitler Highway in France mean no one knows about WWII? The defenders of the Confederacy are making themselves laughingstocks over this.

    These guys got a free pass on their revisionist history for 150 years. It is long past time to accurately represent that era in historical writings and memorials. Honor the dead as you would honor any ancestor, but do not honor the cause they fought for.

  8. The NAACP voted yesterday to lift the boycott of South Carolina, imposed in 2000.

    The national board of directors of prominent U.S. civil rights group the NAACP voted on Saturday to end its 15-year boycott of South Carolina prompted by the display of the Confederate battle flag on state capitol grounds.

    “Emergency resolution passed by the NAACP National Board of Directors at #NAACP106, ending the 15 year South Carolina boycott,” the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said on its Twitter feed.

    The resolution was approved during the NAACP’s annual convention in Philadelphia.

    The NCAA also said that it would accept bids from South Carolina teams to host post-season tournaments.

    The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which observed the boycott by refusing to allow South Carolina to host NCAA basketball championship games, will lift its ban in response to the lowering of the flag. “With this impending change, and consistent with our policy, South Carolina may bid to host future NCAA championships once the flag no longer flies at the State House grounds,” Kirk Schultz, president of Kansas State University and NCAA Board of Governors chair said ahead of the flag removal.

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