From the link (not a reflection on you, Chronos, just reflecting on the attitude given on the site):
Uhhhh, yeah. The South is a monolithic bloc that decries any use of the flag because it’s not truly representative of a racist attitude. Remember, it was all about State’s Rights!
On topic, I watched the Dukes of Hazzard during its original run, and saw some version or other of the General Lee at car shows. I’ve tried watching the show again from time to time, and frankly, I’d rather spend the night with food poisoning. Not funny, every episode has the same plot (pretty consistent among TV shows, I admit), and…it just wasn’t funny. So I have no problem if TVLand, or any other network, wants to take it off the air. It’d be nice if they put on quality old TV, like Ernie Kovacs, but I know that’s above the average viewers head.
It was earlier than the late 1980s. In 1982, John Hawkins, the first black cheerleader at Ole Miss, refused to carry the flag at football games, saying that “some black students see [the flag] as a symbol of white supremacy” and that it was offensive to blacks because it represents the days of slavery.
Additionally, in 1971, at Dixie Hollins High School in Pinellas, Florida, there was a debate and referendum over whether or not to remove the Confederate flag from the school and change the school song from “Dixie” that actually turned violent and got the school closed temporarily. At the same time, at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Florida, some black students walked on on a school football game when the band played “Dixie” and some others burned the Confederate flag, which led to protests and pickets outside the school by about 100 white students and parents.
A lot of the 1971 stuff, has to be seen in the context of the controversy in Florida over desegregation and bussing, with both Dixie Hollins and Nathan Bedford Forrest being formerly white schools that were being integrated, and the whole controversy over that.
That being said (and I’m sure there were more incidents, but I have to look for them), you’re right that the big controversy over the flying of the Confederate flag dates from the late '80s and '90s, which is when you started to see a bunch of protests and calls to stop flying the flag in public places.
Also, one more I found. Apparently, in 1973, there was a lawsuit that led to a decision by a district judge that Escambia High School in Pensacola had to get rid of Confederate symbols and change their football team’s name from “the Rebels”. The judge ruled that the symbols were “racially irritating”, and that “the symbols were not chosen as racial irritants, but they do carry an offensive racial connotation to a substantial number of black as well as to a minority of white students.” The case went through the court system, and in 1976, while it was still going through the courts, the school board responded to a Court of Appeals suggestion to have a referendum of the student body. They did, and the “Rebels” name couldn’t get the 2/3 vote it needed to change the name back. In protest of the results (and because there were about 300 students absent on the day of the vote who didn’t get to vote), some white students hoisted a Confederate flag on the school’s flagpole. Some black students responded by throwing rocks and bricks, and, in the words of Finnegan’s Wake, a row and a ruction soon began, which led to three people shot, 27 others treated for minor injuries, and five adults and three juveniles arrested.
In a 1951 editorial in The Chicago Defender, the author noted the new interest in confederate symbolism and attributed it to an “ugly reaction to our (black Americans) progress.” The History of the Confederate Battle Flag - The Atlantic
It wasn’t that there was no negative reaction to the Confederate battle flag before the 1980s, it’s that our culture didn’t particularly care what non-whites thought before then.
I think there’s more to it than that. We didn’t have the internet or the 24-hour news cycle then. So a protest at a high school or an editorial in a distant city might simply go unnoticed on the national scene.
I love Animal House but frankly the flag is one of the least offensive parts of that film. IIRC Pinto didn’t actually have sex with the 13-year-old girl but he did leave her, drunk and giggling, in a shopping cart on her own front lawn.
No, it was just a typical stupid show of the era, which makes the flag stand out even more. It’s like if there was an Isis flag in Monica’s apartment on Friends and no one commented on it.
Pinto left her alone when she passed out in his bed at the toga party - that’s when he delivered her to her house in a shopping cart. But he almost certainly did have sex with her in the football stadium, after she told him she was only 13 - why else would she tell her parents “We have to get married.” ?
None of those Confederate flags have orange in them. The General Lee was orange, but the flag is red.
Nonsense. As already pointed out, the flag has a strong symbology of cultural heritage which does not necessarily indicate racist intent. Though it is a bit disingenuous to say it’s all about rebelling against authority or simply state’s rights. The one right consistently claimed by the rebelling states was the right to have slavery. But slavery is not on the mind of many people displaying the flag.
At the time, I was a bit young to really get the issue of the Confederate flag on the General Lee, or even the name of the car. It was a fun show about jumping cars around.
But someone on, say, “Parks and Rec” (to name a more contemporary comedy closer in timeframe to ISIS) displaying that flag would not have nearly the cultural heritage connection. That would be a wholly different thing.
On a personal note, I have always appreciated the simplicity and beauty of the blue stripe of stars on a red field. Too bad the symbology associated is the Civil War, and the pro-slavery side. It’s pretty, but I don’t want to be thought a racist just because I like the arrangement.
Again, first I remember seeing that in the paper (remember newspapers, kids?) was in the late 80s. Not to say it didn’t happen somewhere in the 70s, but if it did it wasn’t making any wire reports that I saw. There aren’t enough specifics in this link for me to judge.
Now that’s meatier, but a little before my time. Anyone remember if this made news reports?
It sounds like the dissatisfaction was out there, but maybe it just wasn’t making it into the news media until the 1980s, when I remember it first becoming a thing. And I suspect a lot of Southern blacks (including the ones I ran with at the time) didn’t want to make waves about a symbolic issue when they had more concrete issues to worry about.
I don’t think the Confederate flag would have been all over pop culture as it was in the 1970s-mid 80s if it was commonly perceived as a racist emblem. Tom Petty is practically rolling around in one in that 1980s video I linked, and his black backup singers are dancing and singing in front of a huge rebel flag. (Granted, they may have been financially constrained.) I’m pretty sure Tom Petty just understood the flag as a lot of us did at the time, as an emblem of the South and of generalized rebellion.
A CNN poll out today says a majority of Americans (not just Southerners) still think of it that way.