Heritage? Hate? The Confederate battle flag evokes strong opinions that rarely align

Photo: A half Confederate and half United States flag, is flown Tuesday, July 28, 2020, in Shawnee, Ohio. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

By CALEB D. MOORE
Decem­ber 2020

As waves of racial ten­sion sweep the coun­try and social atti­tudes change, some his­tor­i­cal sym­bols are being regard­ed as less and less accept­able. While one group of Amer­i­cans argue that the Con­fed­er­ate bat­tle flag is a sym­bol of her­itage and his­to­ry, pop­u­lar opin­ions are shift­ing away from the ban­ner’s sor­did connotations.

Mic­ki McElya, a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, says the flag no longer means what it did when the Con­fed­er­ates flew it. 

 
“One of the things we’re see­ing move through this his­to­ry of val­oriz­ing the flag, hold­ing the flag up as a white rebel iden­ti­ty,” McElya said. “You see that it took on a kind of romance.”
 

Many peo­ple also don’t under­stand that the flag com­mon­ly referred to as the Con­fed­er­ate flag is actu­al a bat­tle ban­ner, and not one of the nation­al flags enact­ed by the Con­fed­er­ate Con­gress.  As time goes on, the bat­tle flag has come to rep­re­sent the late CSA and its ideals even more than the actu­al nation­al flags.
 

Embed from Getty Images
 From left: first national flag of the CSA, created in 1861; Confederate battle flag, "Stars and Bars"; second national flag of the CSA, created in 1863; third national flag of the CSA, created in 1865. (Getty Images)

A recent ref­er­en­dum in Mis­sis­sip­pi pro­vides a time­ly exam­ple of how feel­ings towards the ban­ner are shift­ing. Mis­sis­sip­pi has fea­tured an aspect of the Con­fed­er­ate ban­ner on its state flag since 1894, but on Novem­ber 3, 2020, the state vot­ed to approve a replace­ment.

Accord­ing to a bill sent from the Mis­sis­sip­pi House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the new flag was to specif­i­cal­ly “not include the design of the con­fed­er­ate bat­tle flag.” The new flag was approved by more than 69% of voters.

Anti-Con­fed­er­ate bat­tle flag sen­ti­ments have grown sharply around the coun­try as the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment gains sup­port. In many sce­nar­ios, the flag is pre­sent­ed as a counter-protest to BLM, fuel­ing the idea that the flag stands for anti-black racism and big­otry. After riots over the death of George Floyd and police bru­tal­i­ty gripped the nation, many munic­i­pal­i­ties banned dis­play of the ban­ner to keep the peace. 

In oth­er areas, cit­i­zens took mat­ters into their own hands to show their dis­plea­sure with the flag’s dis­play. In 2015, activist and artist Bree New­some scaled a flag­pole in front of the South Car­oli­na state­house and took down the Con­fed­er­ate ban­ner that flew on it. The demon­stra­tion, which took place just weeks after white suprema­cist Dylann Roof mas­sa­cred black parish­ioners at a South Car­oli­na church, was wide­ly cov­ered and became an ear­ly sym­bol that peo­ple were tired of see­ing the ban­ner dis­played in such gov­ern­ment-endorsed prominence. 

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