Confederate flag over South Carolina + photos

I originally wrote this article in the summer of the weird year 2000--remember the computer glitches that were supposed to happen but didn't and the 5 to 4 U.S. Supreme Court decision that put George W. Bush in the White House, and numerous nutty events in between, including this flag issue?--and I submitted it to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from my city of residence at the time, Columbia, SC.  The version below is one I submitted to 'em again in June 2010 for use in their Sunday editorial section--different editor by then--and again, no response.  With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in progress, I'll probably try again with a new version of this article. 

[Update July 1, 2020, twenty years after the flag came down from atop the dome of the SC State House: See South Carolina State House entry on Wikipedia for updated flag placement history. It does not, however, mention civil rights activist Bree Newsome's climbing the 30-foot flagpole and pulling the flag down on June 27, 2015, ten days after Dylann Roof's murder of nine members of the  Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.]

Ten years ago I was walking across the arbor-like grounds of the South Carolina state capitol when I was stopped by a man wearing a denim shirt, blue jeans, well-used cowboy boots, and a battered cowboy hat.   He was about my age, 40-something, and resembled some farmers and farmhands I knew when I was growing up in Southeast Arkansas.  The large creases around his eyes told of years spent working in the sun

He nodded toward a patch of cleared ground and asked, “Is this where they’re gonna put that thing from Africa?”

In my Birkenstocks and wire-frame glasses, I may have looked like a New York liberal.   Being instead an Arkansas-bred liberal, I chose to interpret his derogatory reference to the African-American History monument as a good old boy’s request for factual information. My own history told me that responding indignantly—like a New York liberal—would have been merely rising to take the bait.

Although I knew the groundbreaking ceremony had occurred, I wasn’t sure where the monument would be constructed.    I glanced at the circular patch of dirt and said, “It looks like they’re gonna put something there.”

A moment passed.  I began walking off.  I heard him make a comment about “a 30-foot pole,” but he wasn’t speaking directly to me.  A woman was with him, his wife apparently, and she provided the necessary audience.  I kept walking.

     High above this brief encounter, on the single flagpole atop the capitol dome, two flags flew where three had been flying only a few weeks earlier.  The missing flag was the Confederate battle flag, which had flown above the capitol since 1962.  It was and is clear to most people that a Confederate flag does not belong on a flagpole on the grounds of any statehouse in the United States.  But the honor and glory of a defeated South can cloud some people’s thinking, especially in South Carolina, and especially after a viewing of Gone With the Wind, which was re-released in 1961, the Centennial of the beginning of the Civil War.

     When the rectangular Confederate flag atop the capitol dome came down on July 1, 2000, a slightly different Confederate battle flag—the “Southern Cross,” square with a white border, like the one shown flying above the panorama of dying and wounded Confederate soldiers in the Atlanta train depot scene in Gone With the Wind—was raised on a new flagpole on the north side of the capitol grounds.  It still flies there, next to the Confederate soldiers’ memorial monument “erected by the women of South Carolina” in 1879.  [Updates:  2015, 2018]

     The last bit of legislative compromise in the South Carolina statehouse that resulted in this rather meaningless change of location and pedigree for the Confederate flag concerned how tall the new flagpole should be.  One side said 20 feet, the other side said 30 feet.  I thought a compromise would have logically resulted in a 25-foot pole, but wasn’t sure and couldn’t tell by looking when I passed by it on that Sunday in July ten years ago.

I’d been walking across the capitol grounds that day on one of my frequent treks to the Capitol News Stand on Main Street. After I made my purchase and came out of the store, there was my “thing from Africa” acquaintance with his apparent wife. If he’d thought I was a New York liberal before, he now had evidence. I was carrying a copy of The New York Times.     

   I smiled a friendly smile—people in South Carolina, black and white, often smile and speak when passing one another on the street—and then a thought occurred to me. It was my turn to question him. Nodding toward the Confederate monument I said, “Is that a 30-foot flagpole?”

He answered in the affirmative, and then seized the moment he’d let pass earlier.  “But the flag oughta be up there—,” he turned and pointed toward the copper dome of the capitol, “on the top, where it belongs!”   I had seen and felt the antagonism of the “Keep It Flying” fanatics on the capitol grounds the day the flag on the dome came down and the other Confederate flag simultaneously went up next to the monument.

       There was no honor or glory in their rowdy behavior, or in the way they draped themselves in the Confederate flag.  It was merely more foolishness, like the foolishness of an all-white legislature that had resulted in the flag being placed atop the capitol dome 38 years earlier.  The only moment of truth I witnessed that day was the singing of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” written by Robbie Robertson, a Canadian who learned about the South by spending time in Arkansas with Levon Helm and his parents.  The song in no way suggests the South should have been the winning side in the Civil War.

My response to the man’s opinion that the Confederate flag should be on top of the capitol, flying beneath the United States flag and the South Carolina state flag, was to say “Some people don’t agree with that,” and then head on down the sidewalk.

As it turned out, the spot he asked me about is where the African-American History monument now stands.  The monument fits in well with its surrounding environment, pays tribute to both suffering and accomplishment, and is a long overdue testament to historical accuracy.

     None of these attributes applies to a Confederate flag officially sanctioned by the South Carolina legislature to fly on the statehouse grounds.  Thanks to a majority of South Carolina legislators, past and present, the flag has unfortunately become more of a racist symbol than it would have been otherwise.  Its proper place is in a museum along with the lesser known flags of the Confederacy, such as the “Stars and Bars” flag.  The 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War next year would be a good time for the flag to be put in its proper place. 

See the Wikipedia article on Flags of the Confederacy, which includes mention of the South Carolina controversy.