Ban Gang Symbols along with the Confederate Flag

If America wants to ban the public display of the Confederate flag, it should also ban the display of gang symbols.  Many more people die because of gang violence than because of violence related to the Confederate flag.  It is unlikely that Dylann Roof was motivated to kill the nine people in the Charleston church by the Confederate flag.  If the Confederate flag did not exist, it is likely that he would have done the same thing because of other factors, mainly racial prejudice, mental problems, and easy access to a gun.  The main reason these people died is because the United States and South Carolina failed to control the access to guns by people with homicidal tendencies.  Take away the Confederate flag, these people would still have been killed.  Take away the gun, and they would still be alive.  

In America today political correctness is becoming more important than free speech.  If America is going to limit the free speech of Southern Americans by banning the display of the Confederate flag, then it should also ban the display of gang symbols.  More people were killed in one weekend in Chicago than were killed in the Charleston church, probably all related to gang violence.  Gang members shoot to kill members of rival gangs.  People with Confederate flags don't shoot people with American flags, although they did during the Civil War.  People re-enact the Civil War, but they don't kill each other.  Gang members do.  It is sad that the black and Hispanic communities just accept black on black violence and Hispanic on Hispanic violence.  There is no excuse for a white policeman to shoot an unarmed black man, but one reason it happens is that the white policemen are scared.  They see the killing that takes place among the gangs, and they don't want to get shot.  Both communities need to work together to establish greater trust and security.  One of the main beneficiaries would be the black community itself.  

One way to begin to establish trust and security would be to eliminate the signs of gang territory, if the police can't eliminate the gangs themselves.  If they are going to limit Confederate flags, they should limit gang symbols as well.  

What about Atticus?

I find it hard to get sucked up into all the handwringing about Harper Lee’s new book, “Go Tell a Watchman,” like that in the article about the book in the Wall Street Journal.  First, it’s not clear that Harper Lee would have published the book if she were healthy and of sound mind.  It seems likely that some of those close to her are using this old draft novel to make some money.  That may not be bad if Harper Lee needs some money for her care in her present condition.  But it that is the case, there is no basis for comparing this book to her earlier book, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which she published in her prime. 

Secondly, I don’t think that the fact that Atticus may have had some segregationist leanings makes him a bad man.  He was a child of his times.  In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus defends a black man being prosecuted by the white establishment not because he is black, but because he is innocent.  I’m not sure the book says that he wanted to marry a black woman or take on a black law partner.  I’m not sure he was the white Martin Luther King that the WSJ article makes him out to be. 

I haven’t read the book, so if it says that Atticus participated in a lynching or joined the Ku Klux Klan, then maybe I have to revise my opinion.  But if he is a decent man who wants equal justice for all before the law, even though there is still some social discrimination in the South, then I don’t think that means he is so different from the Atticus in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  If those WSJ writers believe that America today is a perfect racial paradise where Atticus appears as a racist bigot, then they haven’t been reading their own newspaper this summer.  

Confederates in National Cemeteries

I was surprised by the debate in Congress over whether Confederate flags could be placed on graves in national cemeteries, as reported in the New York Times.  I didn’t think Confederates would be buried in national cemeteries, almost by definition, but it turns out that they are.  There is even a Confederate section in Arlington Cemetery, which ironically used to be Robert E. Lee’s home, but was turned into a cemetery by the Union so that Lee could never go home to Arlington.  The Arlington Cemetery history of the section says that there were few or no Confederates in the cemetery until about 50 years after the war, when tempers had cooled and reconciliation was taking place.  It is sad that 100 years later, tempers are flaring again, and old hatreds are being stirred up.  The people stirring up these hatreds have even less idea what slavery was like than their grandfathers who were reconciling 100 years ago.  I suppose the blacks would argue that they were not part of the reconciliation 100 years ago, and can only get their revenge today when they have more political power. 

That position highlights the fact that black slaves did not free themselves.  They were freed by Northern white men.  It’s interesting that in hundreds of years of slavery in the South, including plantations with hundreds of slaves, there doesn’t seem to have been a serious slave uprising or revolt.  Certainly there were small ones, and there were many slaves who escaped to the North, but the slaves did not rise up and defeat their masters.  This is sort of the reverse side of the argument that the Civil War was all about slavery.  It was about slavery, but it was also about politics.  The South was an agrarian economy based heavily on slavery; the North was an industrializing economy, in many cases based on immigrant labor.  In many cases the immigrants were treated little better than slaves, although there were clear legal and moral differences between economic oppression, which still exists today, and slavery.  Nevertheless, these differences affected laws across the board.  How do you regulate or tax land versus labor?  In foreign trade, which is more important, cotton or iron?  As the US expanded westward, it was clear that if slavery did not expand, the industrial Congressional delegations would soon control the Congress, to the detriment of everything that benefited the South.  Therefore, the South felt that there had to be new slave states, if only to protect the political interests of the old slave states.  It was this impasse that led to the Civil War.  It was not started to free the slaves; it was started because the South believed that the only way it could protect its economic and political interests was to form its own country before it fell totally under the control of the North in the US Congress.  It was only after we were deep into the war, which turned out to be much bloodier and more costly than most people had expected, that Lincoln decided to free the slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, well after the war started in 1861.  In any case, the slaves were freed almost entirely due to the efforts of white people, not due to the slaves themselves.  Even after the war, there does not seem to have been a significant uprising by the former slaves against their masters.  To hear the black community today, you would think that all of the former slaves should have slit the throats of their former masters as soon as the South surrendered to the North.  By and large that did not happen, which is to a large extent a tribute to the decency of the former slaves, but also to some extent due to the fact that there were personal bonds between master and slave which meant that not all of the slaves hated their masters.  Of course there were attacks on whites, and there was also a white response, which led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, among other ways of protecting white interests.  In any case, race warfare did not break out in the South after the war, despite its defeat by the North.  Reconstruction was supposed to give blacks political power, but by and large that was a failure.  It took about 100 years for the black community to really rise in rebellion and gain political power in the 1960s. 

One of the most striking images from the recent discussions about the Confederate flag in South Carolina was this one from the New York Times, which shows a black South Carolina legislator in a suit and tie, meeting with two good-old white boys in blue jeans carrying Confederate flags.  Who has the power in this image?  Who represents the future? 

On the cemetery issue, I first learned that there had been a reconciliation for Confederate soldiers when the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked if they could put a tombstone provided by the federal government on my great-grandfather’s grave.  My great-grandfather’s grave is in a local cemetery just a few blocks from where I grew up.  The plot never had any headstones, although there are about ten people buried there.  I don’t know why.  My grandfather knew this, and it did not seem to bother him.  Perhaps my great-grandfather had some personal object to tombstones.  In any case, at this late date, I agreed to allow the UDC to place the marker, which apparently cost them nothing since it was provided by the government.   In this local cemetery, Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile, Alabama, there is a Confederate cemetery that is not a US national cemetery.  I always heard that my great-grandfather won a prize for suggesting the inscription on the monument in the Confederate section, “The Confederate dead.” 

In any case, it seems to me that descendants of Confederate veterans should be able to put Confederate flags on the graves of their ancestors if they want to, wherever they are buried, in private cemeteries, or in national cemeteries.  If there are no Confederates in a cemetery, I see no reason to have some law allowing the flag.  In fact I see no reason for a law of any kind on the subject.  People should be free to respect their ancestors however they want to.  It would not be appropriate to put Confederate flags on the graves of Union soldiers, or on the graves of black people, but it seems like common decency is enough to prevent that, and the cemeteries could control that like they do other things like defacing graves, or leaving improper memorials. 

Confederate Flag Not About Racism

All the talk today is about how the Confederate flag represents racism, but to many Southerners, it represented a refusal to recognize defeat in the Civil War, like the old saying, “Save your Confederate money boys, the South will rise again.”  The South was physically destroyed, plundered and exhausted by the war, perhaps epitomized by Sherman’s march to the sea.  On top of this devastation was added the harsh terms of Reconstruction, under which the victors continued to oppress the defeated South.  Southerners needed ways to retain their pride under Northern oppression, and one way was to cling to symbols of the proud society they had had before the war, like the flag, like honoring those who fought in the war.  It was a way of maintaining their identity in the face of Northern pressure to eliminate it. 

This tradition of Southern pride in its identity lasted for a hundred years, but now, 150 years later, that tradition is dying out.  The country and the South are changing.  South Carolina’s governor is no longer a good, old, white boy, but an Indian-American woman.  Good, old, white boys are becoming a minority in their own land.  The newcomers, including  Latinos and the newly politically powerful black Southerners, have no interest in maintaining that old Southern identity.  They find it offensive. 

The current obsession with slavery in the South overlooks the fact that blacks and whites lived in relative harmony for hundreds of years in the South.  Even in times of slavery and segregation, there were blacks and whites who were friends despite the racial barriers and inequalities of the day.  Race relations today are on a more equal footing, but by no means perfect, as the unrest in Baltimore and St. Louis, and the huge number of black men in prison illustrate.  The Confederate flag was not the problem in St. Louis or Baltimore, nor is it in many of the cities with disproportionate numbers of black men in prison, like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. 

This may be the last generation to try to maintain the Southern legacy of the Civil War.  I grew up with my grandfather telling me stories about his father, who commanded Fort Powell at the entrance to Mobile Bay during the Battle of Mobile Bay.  He said that his father was leading on his arm against a wall of sandbags, when a cannonball went under his arm and into the wall of sandbags.  It did not explode but forever after he had sand embedded in his arm and side from the force of the cannonball hitting the sand.  He also fought at the Battle of Shiloh with his good friend George Dixon who went on to be the driving force behind the construction of the Confederate submarine the Hunley. 

I don’t think it is essential that the Confederate flag fly over the South Carolina capitol or have any other official government role, but it should not be banned from all public display as some sort of evil emblem.  It is not only about race, although race may always be associated with it by those who want to make the association.  An attempt to ban it today is just as much about racism as it was about racism in the 1860s.  People cheer for their hometown sports teams, for family members playing sports.  The love of the old South and the flag is sort of like the hopeless love of the Chicago Cubs, perpetual losers, but fan favorites.  The flag is to some extent a symbol of the fact that even if you lost, you can take pride in your effort.  You may have been defeated, but your spirit is not broken.