Confederate Flag

Within an easy walk of campus (if you knew it was there) was the Peace Light Inn which had an excellent restaurant and being right on the battlefield a large souvenir area.  On one of my visits I bought a confederate battle flag large enough to serve as a curtain in my freshman dorm room which was on the edge of campus facing a row of single family houses.   The guy across the hall had a large Nazi flag that his father had brought back from Germany during WWII.   It was tacked up on the wall of his dorm room.   Neither the dorm advisors nor the other freshman residents found either flag worthy of comment as they were the kind of things found in a  typical 1968 freshman dorm room.  And they were not all that visible from outside the dorm given the locations of our rooms.  

Then one day mid-semester I came back from class to find that both flags had somehow been taken from our two locked rooms.  Roommates,  floor-mates,  and advisors were mystified. At some point we received a note stating that if we wanted the flags back we should come to the lobby area of Apple Hall (the upperclassman dorm) at 8PM.    Clueless and naive we soon found ourselves sitting on the second floor landing having a political discussion with two upperclassmen,  a black guy and a Jewish guy,  who were what passed for campus radicals at Gettysburg in 1968.

We were both rather intrigued with the situation and did not mind explaining ourselves to these guys,   neither of us being aspiring Nazis or white supremacists,   and both of us having entirely military history and general "coolness" reasons for our displays.  They in turn explained the sensitivity of these symbols to some people.   We agreed to not put the flags up in a spot visible through the dorm windows and they gave them back.  

Despite the fact that George Wallace was running for president at the time,  you simply did not give much thought to such things.  

Less controversial were these two posters I had on my dorm room wall that year.