Confederate flag controversy isn’t about political correctness
By Roy Ockert Jr.
July 28, 2015
The Confederate battle flag is part of my Southern heritage.
In high school at Hot Springs and college at Arkansas State we waved the flag and sang “Dixie” at athletic events. My college fraternity flag looked suspiciously like the Confederate battle flag, and we displayed it prominently and often. None of that had anything to do with school mascots.
We were sons and daughters of the South, and we were proud of our heritage. We didn’t understand all that it meant, though. The Civil War was far removed from our childhood, and we got a sanitized version in history classes.
Hot Springs High School, in whose hallowed halls a future president roamed, wasn’t integrated until after both of us had graduated. I worked for the Hot Springs daily newspapers, which maintained separate obituary columns for whites and blacks, and that seemed normal in contemporary society.
When I came to A-State at Jonesboro in 1963, we had a few black students but no black athletes until I was a senior. Once I photographed an A-State basketball game for the Jonesboro Evening Sun, and the selected picture included an opponent’s black player. But when the photo was published, the corner where he had been was cut out, replaced by a caption.
I was fortunate to have one American class at A-State in which the professor, Dr. Lee Dew, taught history as a collection of stories, rather than just names, dates and places. He told the “whys” and “hows” of the Civil War, and my eyes started opening to the darkest years of our country, of man’s inhumanity to man.
My friend Sandra Combs, associate professor of journalism at ASU, sees the Confederate battle flag much differently.
Recently on Facebook she posted a photograph taken in Arkansas earlier this year. It shows several people dressed in white sheets carrying the flag and recounted a conversation with a white teen-ager who defended its use.
“He has never been intimidated with this flag by white people full of hate,” she wrote. “He probably has no idea about the Confederate flag waving at the lynchings, rapes, abuse, property destruction, cross burnings, assassinations, etc., faced, threatened and suffered by African-Americans. ... The flag makes my heart race and brings tears to my eyes.”
Who could be proud of a heritage of slavery, rebellion, treason, lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan? I haven’t sung “Dixie” in decades, and I look at the Confederate battle flag much differently now.
I’m still proud to be a Southerner and a citizen of Arkansas, where I’ve spent all but two years of my life. We’ve come a long way, even from the days of my youth. We’ve rebuilt Arkansas and the South from the ruins of civil war, and we have moved far from the segregated society in which I was raised.
And yet now we are fussing over that old Confederate battle flag.
Over the weekend about 150 people rallied to save the Fort Smith Southside School’s Rebel mascot. After a white man murdered nine black people last month during a Bible study meeting in Charleston, S.C., a national outcry to do away with Confederate symbols resulted. Several businesses, including Wal-Mart, decided to stop selling Confederate flags.
A Southside board committee voted to do away the mascot and stop using “Dixie” as a fight song. Some alumni and school patrons objected. They maintain that the mascot and fight song has no racial overtones. That’s easy to say when you’ve never walked in another’s moccasins.
Southside’s mascot is a white-haired gentleman in a long red coat and blue hat resting on a cane — perhaps a Southern plantation owner. Batesville Southside calls its athletic teams the Southerners and uses a nearly identical image. Highland High School’s mascot is the Rebels, also represented in sexist fashion by an old gentleman, and the Confederate flag is used often. A Facebook flap over the mascot in 2010 resulted in no changes.
Meanwhile, various “rebels” have been making a show of their right to use the Confederate flag, including a group who waved flags in Oklahoma City during a visit by President Obama. Oklahoma wasn’t even a state during the Civil War, which wipes out the heritage argument. Oklahoma’s heritage is largely about its place as a dumping ground for the Indian tribes whose land we took.
To call this a battle for political correctness is ludicrous. The Confederate battle flag has a history similarly negative as the Nazis’ swastika. Thanks to the First Amendment, all Americans have the right to use either, but neither is symbol that merits a place on government facilities or in public events.
As for its heritage, the battle flag was never even the official flag of the Confederacy, which used three other flags. Its use was limited until the 20th century, when the Dixiecrat Party adopted it, the KKK flew it on occasion and it was waved at University of Mississippi football games.
First Corinthians tells us: “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.”
To many, Confederate symbols are childish things. To others, they are hateful things. Either is a good reason to put them away.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.