[QUOTE=Sampiro]
…hoist the flag of the Vatican, the Black Panthers or the Jolly Roger, sing a rousing nasal chorus of John Brown’s Body and claim this thread for the cause of Abolitionism.
[/QUOTE]
That raises an interesting question. How come nobody ever gets all het up over the Jolly Roger? Do people who display it mean to say, “Hooray for murder, rape and robbery!”
They don’t really understand the implications of it because the concept of a pirate has been completely watered down into a Disney archetype by our pop culture.
The same exact thing happened with the “king.” People just accept Burger King’s mascot, not realizing that a king (in the Medieval sense that they intend) is basically just a dictator. “Yay! Hooray for absolutist monarchy! Burger dictator!”
[QUOTE=spoke-]
That raises an interesting question. How come nobody ever gets all het up over the Jolly Roger? Do people who display it mean to say, “Hooray for murder, rape and robbery!”
[/QUOTE]
I know of people who do not let their kids sport the Jolly Roger for something close to that reason.
-FrL-
[QUOTE=spoke-]
That raises an interesting question. How come nobody ever gets all het up over the Jolly Roger? Do people who display it mean to say, “Hooray for murder, rape and robbery!”
[/QUOTE]
When modern-day murderers, rapists, and robbers start sporting the Jolly Roger, then people will make that association.
[QUOTE=you with the face]
When modern-day murderers, rapists, and robbers start sporting the Jolly Roger, then people will make that association.
[/QUOTE]
And, if that happens, cursed be anyone who displays it as an expression of their fandom for Johnny Depp.
[QUOTE=Charger]
And, if that happens, cursed be anyone who displays it as an expression of their fandom for Johnny Depp.
[/QUOTE]
Not cursed. Stupid.
Nobody asked me, so here’s what I think:
Every so often I feel sympathy for people who have to perform such violent mental contortions in order to feel good about themselves. But then I remember that not being saddled with the sins of your forebears is one of the privileges of being an American. I’m not forcing anyone to wallow in the worst, most shameful part of their past, so I owe no deference to their puerile justifications for doing it. It’s enough to know that, with five centuries on this continent to choose from, it’s the five years of armed treason in the self-proclaimed defense of slavery, destroying much of the South in the process, that makes their hearts sing. Everything else is layer upon layer of obfuscation laid atop the fact that the flag was commissioned, designed, sewn and flown to lead the guns blasting death in furtherance of the proposition that slavery shall not vanish from the face of the Earth (for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the articles of secession already linked to, try Article I, Section 9, clause 4 of the travesty of a Confederate Constitution.
After the war the flag pretty much disappeared until the government again began interfering with the systematic mistreatment of black people in the 50’s and 60’s, when it popped up again, and again it was the symbol of southern states’ struggle against such interference. This second chapter alone taints the flag irredeemably. It was never an innocent symbol and it just worked itself deeper into the racist mire as time went on. All the sweet, harmless people who - I’m told - displayed the flag out of a nonideological pride in their heritage, well, they’re indistinguishable from the good folk displaying it out of solidarity with Lester Maddox and Bull Connor and all their vermin brood.
That political/military symbols (like battle flags) are spectacularly unsuited to making peaceful, apolitical statements is not an obscure or hard-to-grasp fact. That’s one reason I don’t try to swallow whole anyone’s wide-eyed insistence that somewhere inside their heads they’ve managed to strip away every relevant historical fact about the hateful rag and replace them with happy fantasies of cotillions and church socials and if we could only look in there too, why then we’d know how good and pure they are. Even if this were remotely plausible, that kind of fingers-in-the-ears ignorance deserves no respect no matter how much poetry and prose is piled up around it.
And I’m kind of tired of excusing people for their innocence/ignorance. Make up your mind: either the flag is an innocuous pop-culture icon which has shed old political and historical significance, in which case there’s no reason to defend it, or it’s an important piece of southern history and culture, in which case there’s no excuse for not knowing it’s real meaning and it’s time to admit that that’s what you really stand for. Actually, the truth is, it’s neither. The flag is an extremely minor artifact which was revived a century later by bigots to be pressed into service when it was again time for southern states to defy federal authority with regard to racial matters. It bled into pop media, as everything does, but that’s never been an excuse for anything. In any event, the truth has been explained often enough, in small-enough words, for everyone to have a basis to choose, and at this point everyone has.
Of course, no matter what anyone thinks or can pretend to believe, use of the flag sure does tend to alienate black Americans, keeping them from participating in all this wholesome heritage-celebratin’. Since many blacks have at least as deep and wide connection with the South as most whites, they’d certainly have much to contribute. You’d think that driving them away would be seen as a problem by anyone sincerely interested in regional history and culture. But, apparently, not.
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
The same exact thing happened with the “king.” People just accept Burger King’s mascot, not realizing that a king (in the Medieval sense that they intend) is basically just a dictator. “Yay! Hooray for absolutist monarchy! Burger dictator!”
[/QUOTE]
This is the reason that I boycott Stalinburgers, even though I like the concept of the drive-through Gulag.
Well said, King of Soup.
Just to maintain my SDMB contrarian cred, I’m going to take the opposite position from what I’ve already posted to this thread, somewhat:
I work with Bubbas, I live next door to them, and I deal with them every day. My livelihood depends on keeping open communiction with our employees, a great many of whom are Bubbas.
He has no animosity whatsoever with Blacks. If they are in authority, are in the right, and treat him with courtesy and friendship, he has no problem taking orders from them. He doesn’t mind at all if his daughter brings home a balck boyfriend, once he gets to know the kid, as he needs to do with any boy. He has no problem with homosexuals, except that the ones who try to stay closeted insult his intelligence. He’s reflexively generous and helpful. As a Southerner he’s no more or less partiotic an American as anywhere else, although by his lights he sometimes thinks himself more so. But growing up he’s given a more profound sense of himself as a Southerner that a kid growing up in the Midwest or New England or Pacific Northwest do for having been born where they were.
Not that that those other kids are lacking their own regional identities, just lacking an aspect of defiance that is only a natural legacy of military insurgency, and it’s also only natural that that sense of defiance would attach itself to a flag, long after the racial bigotry and successionism has washed away.
So we get the damn flag. But If enough Black people (not just the self-appointed "leaders of the Black Community) were to express genuine pain at its presence on the porches and bumbers of their neighbors, Bubba would take it down once and for all, because even more than defiance, humility is a Southern virtue.
[QUOTE=The King of Soup]
they’re indistinguishable from the good folk displaying it out of solidarity with Lester Maddox and Bull Connor and all their vermin brood.
[/QUOTE]
You know, Lewis Carrol almost used “vermin brood” insead of my username. There but for the grace of God and all that.
[QUOTE=The King of Soup]
After the war the flag pretty much disappeared until the government again began interfering with the systematic mistreatment of black people in the 50’s and 60’s, when it popped up again, and again it was the symbol of southern states’ struggle against such interference.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not here to defend the flag, but I will fight some ignorance.
This idea that the flag disappeared between the Civil War and the era of desegregation seems to pop up frequently on these boards. I’m not sure where it arose, but it just ain’t so. The flag was around continuously as a generic symbol of “Dixie” from the Civil War onward.
For example, it showed up in advertising and marketing: Here’s the Dixie Oil logo (pre-Civil-Rights-era). Here’s another variant of that logo. And Dixie Crystals Sugar Company used a stylized rebel flag for its logo for many decades, pre-dating the Civil Rights era. The flag was carried into combat by several units during World War II. Wiki cite.
What happened during the desegregation era was not that the flag reappeared, but rather that it was seized upon by some as a symbol of resistance to federal authority in general and desegregation in particular.
By the 70s, it had (for most folks who displayed it) again become a pretty innocuous symbol of either (a)Southern identity or (b)generalized rebellion (see, for example, its brief appearance in Animal House). It was available for purchase as a patch for your jeans in childrens’ comic books.
Nobody was bitching about the flag in the 70s and into the mid 80s. (If you contend otherwise, show me some proof.)
Beginning in the late 80s, you started hearing people complaining about the flag, and in particular its display on statehouse grounds. (That came to a head with the fight over the flag in South Carolina, and the removal of the emblem from the Georgia state flag.)
By this point even most older white Southerners have become so sensitized to the flag and how it is perceived that hardly anybody in these parts displays it. Mostly because it would be impolite to do so.
Now you can argue about whether or not the display of the rebel flag was ever appropriate in any setting, and I may even agree with you, but let’s not rewrite the history to fit our thesis.
Oh, and King of Soup, I agree with you that black Southerners have equal claim to our shared cultural heritage. For me, that is a very good reason not to display the rebel flag – because owing to its history it excludes that part of our population from participating in the celebration of the culture.
As I said, most right-thinking folks would (these days) consider a display of the rebel flag rude.
[QUOTE=spoke-]
What happened during the desegregation era was not that the flag reappeared, but rather that it was seized upon by some as a symbol of resistance to federal authority in general and desegregation in particular.
[/quote]
This is an attempt to rewrite history - in that display of the Confederate flag became more widely popularized in the South starting in the 1950s as a symbol of resistance(sometimes violent) to the civil rights movement.
Well, you have to be impressed by folks who are so insistent about how they’re more polite and humble than you. :dubious:
[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
This is an attempt to rewrite history - in that display of the Confederate flag became more widely popularized in the South starting in the 1950s as a symbol of resistance(sometimes violent) to the civil rights movement.
[/quote]
It was popular as a symbol of Dixie all along. (See my earlier cites.)
What changed was how it was used. I think we agree that it was seized upon by racists in the 50s.
Sorry, where did I say that we are more polite than anyone? I just said that most Southerners today would regard it as rude to display the flag. Which is true. Your snark is unwarranted.
[QUOTE=spoke-]
Sorry, where did I say that we are more polite than anyone?
[/QUOTE]
He’s quoting two people in one post.
Yes, it does.
Whites don’t own Southern heritage! I’ve gone to three jazz concerts in the last few months. Who owns jazz? Who owns backyard barbecues and crawdad boils? Who owns the privilege of being a Titans fan or an Auburn fan or storytelling? Swett’s Restaurant in North Nashvile is an institution open to all races. And you can volunteer to work in a campaign just like anybody else.
If you are not participating in Southern heritage and you live in the South, you need to find new friends and a different grocery store. Don’t kid yourself that anyone but you is keeping you from celebrating living in the South.
Facts don’t matter much in threads on this subject, but I’ll give some anyway, and I’ll remain objective rather than not reopen the argument:
As has been pointed out God knows how many times by now, what’s called “the rebel flag” in these threads was never the flag of the Confederacy. Variations on it (usually square in shape) were used as battle flags by a number of Confederate regiments. Most returning Confederate veterans generally wanted to forget the flag and forget the war, so its usage died down for a generation or two.
Now then young feller… most reb outfits back in them days deceerated their flags with the name of the unit and the names of the battles in which they’d fought, and it wasn’t at all uncommon for a company within a regiment to have its own flag. For example, the 6th Kentucky Cavalry had this flag though the brigade of which they were a part flew this one. Now, that same brigade included the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry, whose regimental flag is (like most Confederate regimental flags) no longer in existence, but looked very similar to that of the 6th (the St. Andrews cross with stars and with . At one point the 3rd Kentucky was commanded by a colonel named Jacob Wark “Roarin’ Jake” Griffith, whose brothers fought in the 6th, and the 3rd and the 6th had similar stars and bars flags.
“Roarin’ Jake” was seriously wounded in the war, but he survived, returned to his wife Mary, and had a large family. His sixth son, David Llewellyn Wark, was born in 1875. He idolized his father, all the more so after the Colonel died when David was 10, and constantly begged his uncles and other relatives for tales of his father’s bravery during the war. When he moved to NYC to seek his fortune, dropping the Llewellyn to become just plain D. W. Griffith, he used the battle flags of his father’s unit and his uncles units in his movie Birth of a Nation. (Beginning around 3:40 in this clip you’ll see three flags of the Kentucky Volunteers Brigade (nicknamed “the Kentucky Orphans”) which included the 3rd, 6th, and other regiments, and one of the flags of course is the famous “rebel flag”. It’s elsewhere in the movie as well during the battlefield scenes (considered probably the most accurate Civil War battlefield scenes ever filmed incidentally; there were actually Civil War veterans among the extras who were used as consultants).
BIRTH OF A NATION was a huge hit (not just in the south but across the nation and the world) and led to a renaissance of Confederate memorabilia, especially as most of the veterans of the war were dead or very old and the world had changed six times (telephones, cars, electricity, etc.) and this gave a nostalgia not unlike WW2 underwent at the time of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. So, Confederate iconography became huge (not that it had ever completely gone away). Also the KKK, largely dead by this time, was pretty much reborn, and not just in the south (in fact, the Mid-west and the northeast not only got their first chapters but… well, you can look it up).
So what’s called the rebel flag became pretty big around this time, especially on college campuses. In Tuscaloosa it was for several years the unofficial symbol of the University of Alabama football team and was waved at all the games, partly because of the “Crimson Tide” nickname (which came about due to a muddy game with Auburn in 1907) and partly because of the school’s history (the U. of AL was called “The West Point of the South” and trained cadets until it was captured and burned in the last week of the Civil War) and the flag was never waved more enthusiastically of course than when UA played a northern (or at least non-southern) team. Most famous was the 1926 Rose Bowl, in which the University of Alabama defeated the University of Washington in a major upset and the next day it’s said that rebel flags were flying all over the city of Pasadena and all across the nation, hung by Bama fans and fans who were glad to see UW defeated.
So, short story, that flag was extremely popular long before the Civil Rights Era. It was featured very prominently in the movie GONE WITH THE WIND and in the promotion of GONE WITH THE WIND (it was hung from one end of Atlanta to the other in 1939) and it was probably in this time that most people began believing it was the Confederate flag, since it’s the one everyone knew. (Dixie also had a renaissance around this time- it wasn’t sung that much by the end of the 19th century, but picked up again after films started using it.)
So, in 1926 any college football fan (we’re talking millions of people) would have recognized the flag. By 1940 it was the de-facto Confederate flag. As mentioned, it was used in World War II and not just on the planes and tanks manned by southerners (in fact Air Corps General Nathan B. Forrest III famously downplayed any mention of his famous grandfather or the Confederacy [he was basically sick of hearing comments on his ancestry]). In Toccoa some units also used a version of the Rebel Yell, though it’s unknown how accurate it was ( very loud audio file of a Confederate veteran performing the yell in old age- imagine it with the energy of a young man and then multiply it by about 3,000 for full effect as to how it sounded on a battlefield).
So while there’s no question it was waved more in the 1950s, it was a southern icon LONG before then, though due more to motion pictures and football than to an unbroken line from the Civil War onward.
Alternate Birth of a Nation link (flags still start around 3:40). The Google Video always switches to the trailer for some odd reason.
[QUOTE=Charger]
And, if that happens, cursed be anyone who displays it as an expression of their fandom for Johnny Depp.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=you with the face]
Not cursed. Stupid.
[/QUOTE]
My God. In this hypothetical scenario, someone is displaying a symbol as an attempt to draw it away from the negative stereotype. You may consider it a waste of time, or an investment in the frivolous, but calling someone “stupid” based on that is judgmental.
It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to research criminal records and intricately study the details of current events and compare the them to the items in my closet so I can burn any clothing that is similar to criminals. Before long, people will be saying, “Look at that guy in the green shirt with the collar. He’s indistinguishable from that rapist on the news.”
The moral of the story is, don’t do anything. Ever. Because someone bad may have once done the same thing and, whether or not you think that thing is worth dwelling on, someone else will dwell on it and is going to judge you for it.
Damn, I looked good in that green shirt, too.
[burns shirt]
Oh, shit! Oh, shit! FIRE!
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Variations on it (usually square in shape) were used as battle flags by a number of Confederate regiments. Most returning Confederate veterans generally wanted to forget the flag and forget the war, so its usage died down for a generation or two.
[/QUOTE]
To quibble a bit, Mississippi adopted its state flag, incorporating the battle flag, in 1893.
That was nearly 30 years after the war, but long before the Civil Rights era, or Gone With the Wind, or even Birth of a Nation. It doesn’t seem to me that the flag ever went away.
[QUOTE=spoke-]
To quibble a bit, Mississippi adopted its state flag, incorporating the battle flag, in 1893.
That was nearly 30 years after the war, but long before the Civil Rights era, or Gone With the Wind, or even Birth of a Nation. It doesn’t seem to me that the flag ever went away.
[/QUOTE]
Wasn’t aware of that- thanks. Our arguments are the same though about it having “come back” long before the Civil Rights Era if it ever went away at all, and the movies/UofAL definitely increased its visibility outside of Mississippi.
As an aside, from what I’ve seen in the state and read of in historical documents and from the Mississippians I’ve known, that state seems to have the most Confederate identity of any former Confederate state. Of course they were probably affected more economically- they went from being one of the richest per capita (the only state in the nation where 50% of the white people were from families that owned at least one slave) to one of the consistently poorest states of the Union (still always in the bottom 3 or so) even though they saw no more devastation by the war than did Georgia or Tennessee or Virginia. As with every other southern state I’ve no doubt that the people there run the socioeconomic and intellectual gamuts and you can find everything from the loopiest of liberals to full fledged bonafide Klansmen in most towns, but in general it seems to have the most Confederate ghosts in the modern day governmentally and socially.
