THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 31, 1994 TAG: 9408310032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
I SUSPECT MY black friends would be shocked to learn that I displayed a large Confederate battle flag on the wall of my dormitory room at college.
I was extremely proud of that banner. It was bright red, crossed with white stars sewn on a blue background. Colorful. I thought then - and still cling to the notion - that it was one of the handsomest flags ever to fly from a staff.
The battle flag reminded me of my roots - of ancestors who had fought in the Civil War. I was proud of them. And if someone - black or white - had told me it was a symbol of slavery, I'd have said they were crazy.
But times have changed. The situation isn't hypothetical anymore. Down in South Carolina, a Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina statehouse has raised the ire of blacks who have held - and are planning more - protest marches in the state.
Over the past few weeks, I have been writing about some of the absurdities of political correctness. But this one has nothing to do with whether lawn jockeys should be painted black or white.
The issue is a big one, although it is born of pettiness. The issue is: Does a state have a constitutional right to fly any banner it chooses over its statehouse no matter how deeply that flag offends a sizeable portion of its citizenry?
Probably. After all, the courts have defended practices much more odious to many. Like the right of Ku Klux Klansmen to march on public streets in their white duds and pointy-headed caps.
The pettiness is that of the South Carolina Legislature, which, in the manner of an ill-bred schoolboy, is thumbing its nose at black citizens who are entitled to respect.
Those legislators would put a different spin on it, arguing that the flag atop the statehouse is a way of ``preservin owah suth-run hurritage.'' And that the War Between the States was fought over states' rights, suh, and not slavery.
All of which misses the point. Millions of blacks see the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of white oppression. It reminds them of ancestors sold on the block at auction, cast into chains, totally at the mercy of their white masters, and of the worst images that the indefensible practice of slavery conjures.
The louts in the South Carolina Legislature are so blinded by their love of a phony South that they have lost touch not only with reality but also with the very traditions they seek to preserve.
Mark Twain caught a whiff of those traditions when he observed that ``Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making Southern character as it existed before the (Civil) war that he was in great measure responsible for the war.''
Scott's novels, apart from their picturesque descriptions, planted in the Southern mind a sense of history, chivalry and, above all, honor.
And, though I was probably a romantic fool, those were the ideals to which I paid allegiance many years ago when I, almost reverently, draped the battle flag on my dorm wall.
Honor was everything. Or so it seemed then. And does today. Which is why if - then or now - a black were to see a banner on my wall and say that it gave offense and reminded him of unspeakable cruelties to his own ancestors, I would do the only honorable thing. I would apologize for having given offense. And I'd waste no time removing it from my wall. I would do that no matter how much, or for what reasons, I admired the flag. It would be, simply, a question of good manners. Manners which, in my vanity, I believe to be the graceful evidence of an enduring and honorable code passed along from Southern ancestors.
And that is what the debate concerning the battle flag atop that statehouse is all about. Those bubbas in the South Carolina Legislature should pay less heed to their battle flag and more to their manners. Whatever phony tradition they fancy to preserve with their red-necked arrogance has the odor of swamp gas rather than magnolias. And the substance of ashes. by CNB