THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702140034
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: Stephen Chapman
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: 80 lines
It's common knowledge that the South is becoming more indistinguishable from the rest of America every day, but that process is not complete just yet. Only a couple of weeks ago did the Virginia senate finally feel enough embarrassment to vote to retire the state song, ``Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,'' which contains these lyrics: ``There's where the old darkey's heart am long'd to go,/There's where I labored hard for Old Massa.''
The song is one of those symbols of the Old South that stoutly resist being relegated to the past. The most familiar of these is the Confederate battle flag. It still flies over the South Carolina capitol 132 years after Appomattox, and it is conspicuously incorporated into the state flags of both Georgia and Mississippi.
It's also emblazoned on bumper stickers and T-shirts and waved at football games. One peculiarity of the South is that many people who would stomp anyone burning an American flag proudly embrace the banner of those who tried to destroy the country that the American flag represents.
Most black Southerners object to such exercises in nostalgia, and many whites are coming around to the same view. Georgia Gov. Zell Miller tried and failed to change his state flag. South Carolina Gov. David Beasley may likewise fail in his effort to persuade the legislature to remove the red flag with the blue St. Andrew's cross from atop the statehouse in Columbia.
Miller and Beasley face a lot of opposition among their white constituents, many of whom think you cannot be a proud southerner without also being proud of the Lost Cause. Defenders of the Confederate flag say they have good reason to cherish it.
``It's certainly not about race from our position,'' Christopher Sullivan of the Southern Heritage Association recently told The New York Times. ``It's about the courage and valor of Confederate soldiers on the battlefield.'' A letter issued by South Carolina Republican legislators who favor the flag said that if it is removed, ``the day will come when the children of South Carolina will be taught to be ashamed of their history and their heritage.''
I have a surprise for those lawmakers: The children of South Carolina should be ashamed of some parts of their history and their heritage, particularly the part that involved treating human beings as property to be used and disposed of by other human beings - and the part that involved a determined effort to demolish the Union rather than accept any interference with this barbarous practice.
Having been born and raised in Texas, I have nothing but affection for the South. But I'm not the only Southerner who was taught from an early age that there was a right side and a wrong side in the Civil War and that the South was on the wrong side. It was on the wrong side because the Confederacy was first and foremost an effort to defend the enslavement of black people as a moral right and an economic good.
It's true that brave and decent people fought and died to preserve the Southern way of life, but that doesn't make the Confederacy a noble undertaking. Brave and decent people fought to keep the American colonies under British rule. Brave and decent people fought for Germany under Hitler. We can respect the sincerity and sacrifices of all those people without revering what they were trying to achieve.
Displays of the Confederate flag are not really about honoring the courage and valor of the men in gray. It came into vogue only during the modern civil rights movement to express opposition to racial integration and equality. South Carolina didn't start flying it over the state house until 1962. That's when many white Southerners were vowing, with George Wallace, ``Segregation forever.'' Abandoning official displays of the banner would be a public sign that white Southerners have moved beyond the darkest elements of their past.
It's not a matter of ``cultural genocide,'' as the flag's defenders claim, for Southerners to symbolically renounce the evil of slavery and secession - any more than it's cultural genocide for Americans in general to recognize that our ancestors were wrong to try to exterminate the Indians or to deny basic rights to women or to burn witches. It's a matter of simple honesty and maturity.
We owe our forebears a lot, but we don't owe them blind, unreasoning worship. What is good in Southern culture - and there is a lot that is - deserves to be preserved. But the first step in preserving the good is separating it from the bad. MEMO: Mr. Chapman writes for the Chicago Tribune. His column is
distributed by Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles,
Calif. 90045.