THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702090091
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEVIN SACK, THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: 73 lines
In the 1860s the fight was about states' rights and slavery. In the 1960s the battle was joined over voting rights and segregation. Now the war is over symbols, vestiges of the previous two campaigns but powerful enough to demonstrate how deep the racial divide remains in a region that fancies itself the New South.
Across the region, from the courthouse squares where Confederate monuments stand to the statehouses where the battle flag still flies, the symbols of the Old South are under siege. And just as those symbols represent something larger, so do today's skirmishes over pennants and songs and memorials.
``It really deals with issues of identity and world view and ethnicity,'' said Charles Reagan Wilson, a historian at the University of Mississippi. ``Are we one people or two?'' Many white Southerners base their identity on ancestry, Wilson said, ``and to cut that tie with the symbols, with the genealogy, is for them a kind of cultural death.''
Puncture the surface of today's debates - whether the Confederate battle flag should fly over the South Carolina Capitol, whether ``Carry Me Back to Old Virginia'' should remain that state's official song - and you scrape the nerve endings of all of the country's racial conflicts: affirmative action, school desegregation, immigration, welfare, even black English.
``They are proxy fights for traditionalism and conservatism in Southern culture,'' said Dan Carter, a historian at Emory University. Or as Wilson said, ``It's about who has the power, really.''
These battles over cultural identity have been raging for more than two decades. But perhaps never before have they been fought on so many fronts at any one time.
Most prominent is Gov. David Beasley's crusade in South Carolina to lower the Confederate battle flag from atop the Capitol in Columbia, where it has flown beneath the U.S. and South Carolina flags since 1962. Stiff resistance has emerged in the legislature, fed by an organized campaign led by the state's Sons of Confederate Veterans.
In Virginia, the Senate voted in January to retire the state song, ``Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,'' because of its references to ``darkies'' and ``old massa.'' The House of Delegates is expected to follow.
In Georgia, Gov. Zell Miller failed in 1993 in an effort to change the state flag, which incorporates the Confederate standard. Now a plaintiff is awaiting the decision of a federal appeals court in his effort to do away with the current flag.
At the University of Mississippi, where the mascot is the Rebel, officials continue to face pockets of resistance in trying to dissuade students and alumni from waving the Confederate battle flag and singing ``Dixie'' at athletic events.
And in Maryland, Confederate heritage groups are irate about last month's decision by the Department of Motor Vehicles to recall the 78 Confederate battle-flag license plates issued to members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The newest targets are the obelisks and statues that stand as monuments to the Confederate dead in almost every Southern courthouse square. In Franklin, Tenn., Leslie Patrick Steele filed a lawsuit in December seeking removal of that town's Confederate soldier statue, as well as $44 million in damages.
Similarly, black leaders in Walterboro, S.C., last month petitioned the Colleton County Council to tear down the Confederate monument that was erected on the grounds of the county courthouse in 1911.
Acts of vandalism and violence are also occurring.
Last week in Hayneville, Ala., a Confederate battle flag was spray-painted on a monument to Viola Liuzzo, a civil-rights worker shot to death near there in 1965.
On Jan. 22, a 19-year-old white man, Jason Farmer, reportedly instigated a fight with a black student at Milton High School in Alpharetta, Ga., when he waved a Confederate flag while walking on campus. Farmer is charged with assault.
KEYWORDS: CONFEDERATE SYMBOLS