Racism is alive and well, not just in South Carolina, United States of America, but everywhere you have people and different skin colours. And the Confederate flag is a sad reminder.
Until the shooting on Wednesday June 24, at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which killed nine black people, the Confederate flag remained just a relic. With the Dylan Roof racist killing of blacks, the debate has shifted to a symbol which many Blacks remember with trauma and disdain.
Ten other states would eventually follow South Carolina in secession, forming the Confederate States of America. However, of the three flags the Confederacy would go on to adopt, none is the one that is traditionally recognised today. The ‘Stars and Bars’ flag, currently the subject of controversy, was actually the battle flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
After the war, the symbol became a source of southern pride and heritage, as well as a remembrance of Confederate soldiers who died in battle. But as racism and segregation gripped the nation in the century following, it became a divisive and violent emblem of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist groups. It was also the symbol of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, or “Dixiecrats”, that formed in 1948 to oppose civil rights platforms of the Democratic Party. Then South Carolina Governor, Strom Thurmond, was the splinter group’s nominee for president that same year – he won 39 electoral votes.
Now, the flag is a frequent emblem of modern white supremacist groups. The alleged Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, has just latched on that emblem to perpetuate evil. According to him, he was hoping to start a race war.
At one point, South Carolina had the highest ratio of Blacks to Whites, which is one reason Roof choose Charleston.
In his manifesto, Roof said he was motivated by Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black killed by George Zimmerman. Upon googling ‘Crimes by Blacks on Whites’, he found that the statistics of Blacks committing crimes against Whites were alarming and wondered what the hullabaloo about Trayvon was all about.
He then set out to balance the equation. He started at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church.
The flag remains an emblem of slavery. South Carolina and other confederate states went to war just because they did not want to abolish slave trade. By leaving the flag still flying, South Carolina is not keeping history; it is evoking an era in American history when a certain race was regarded as less human.
That’s not true, says Barry Isenhour, a member of the group, who says it’s really about honouring the Confederate soldiers who gave their lives. For him, the war was not primarily about slavery, but standing up to being over-taxed, and he says many southerners abhorred slavery.
“They fought for the family and fought for the state. We are tired of people saying they did something wrong. They were freedom-loving Americans who stood up to the tyranny of the North. They seceded from the U.S. government not from the American idea,” Isenhour told the BBC.
He displays a flag on his car, but lives in a street where the flying of any flags is not permitted. They are a dwindling sight these days, he thinks, because people are less inclined to fly them in the face of hostility – monuments honouring southern Civil War Generals are, he says, regularly vandalised.
Denouncing the “hateful” groups like the Ku Klux Klan who he says have dishonoured the flag, he adds that people should be just as offended by the Union Jack, the Dutch flag or the Stars and Stripes, because they all flew for nations practising slavery.
Others strongly disagree with his analysis. African-Americans, especially older ones, are traumatised when they see the flag, says Salim Khalfani, who has lived in Richmond for nearly 40 years and thinks it risks making the city look like a “hick” backwater that is still fighting the Civil War.
“If it’s really about heritage than keep the flag on your private property or in museums, but don’t mess it up for municipalities and states who are trying to bring tourists here because this will have the opposite effect.”
African-American author, Clenora Hudson-Weens, saw people waving the flags on the street in 2013. “I just said to them, ‘This is 2013’ and they just smiled. I personally believe in some traditions but this is a tradition that is so oppressive to Blacks. I wouldn’t be proud waving a flag that has an ambience of racism and negativity.”
Many Americans will be familiar with the arguments on either side, but perhaps not with the convoluted origins of the flag itself.