History teaches us that if we don. Retired military, Barnes used to attend all the Ole Miss college football games, but he now watches on TV. The flag that Dylann Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, endorses the violence he committed. The night was solemn; speakers at marches coast to coast acknowledged the heavy toll a single rare verdict of a police officer found guilty of murder had taken. White folks can be that, too. The NAACP respects the constitutional, first amendment right for private citizens to maintain symbols and monuments on private property, he says. The Ku Klux Klan flew it at lynching parties and angry mobs waved it outside public schools as black children enrolled; in front of white segregation academies and next to leering dogs unleashed on black protesters wanting the right to vote. Black South Carolinians have been asking for the flag's removal since 1972, and it's been a formal demand of the legislature's Black Caucus since 1977. But it's not a coincidence that white Southerners were embracing the Confederate battle flag just as the South's system of violently enforced white supremacy was under its first real threat since Reconstruction. The Confederacy itself was founded to preserve slavery and promote white supremacy (see, for example, : "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery the greatest material interest of the world," or the. We are stopping by homes with flags, but owners keep pointing us on down the road to him. The flag was moved from the Capitol dome to the most prominent spot on the Capitol grounds, near a monument to Confederate soldiers. In this way they honor their ancestors. And from the moment the design of its best-known flag was proposed, some Southerners began imbuing it with the symbolism of their cause. Embrace Violence. Be, who discusses the flag respectfully with friends who like it, challenges Massey, Hentz and others to probe deeper. In the 2000 Republican primary, both George W. Bush and John McCain were asked what should be done about the flag. The first cut of the film also showed Lindy and husband, Ira Isonhood, flying the Confederate battle flag on a 20ft pole in the backyard of one of their homes. Pretty much any non-Conservative. To wait longer would be a crime. For 75 years, it was used as a reminder of the nobility of that cause. Take Down the Confederate Flag - The Atlantic Give a last-minute gift with a lasting impact. A photo of the man wearing the sweatshirt was just one of the images of hateful symbols that have circulated from the mob, whose violence led to four deaths and wreaked havoc on Congress. The only thing that has changed is how the rest of the country sees the cause it represents. But I dont believe everyone who likes the flag is racist. What has Mississippi done to say that it is sorry for the rape, torturing and killings of scores of its black citizens in order to create a white majority? Be says. To others, its a trendy phrase you most likely associate with the new age mentality brought on by the latest Mixed Martial Arts fighting rage to sweep the country. He repeats SCVs selective semantics with precision: the south seceded over states rights to financial independence; the north and Abraham Lincoln werent against slavery at the outset; northern tariffs were killing the south; few southerners and soldiers owned humans; slavery was fading anyway; and it wasnt about white supremacy. April 21, 202111:12. The Havok Journal welcomes re-posting of our original content as long as it is done in compliance with our Terms of Use. I dont think the black people around here care, Lindy says. As red flags show up more and more over time, you'll start noticing patterns of behavior. To me, the flag is not a racist thing. Barnes has black friends, he says, and points out that African Americans use the N-word. At first, white Southerners mostly displayed it at Civil War cemeteries and at memorials and veterans' reunions. Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. To many white people in the south and beyond, the Confederate flag is a sign of historic pride and defiance to whatever is currently called liberalism; to most black Americans, the flag stands for white supremacy and racial violence. The very same people that exploit the working class for cheap labor and create systems to undermine their development through poor education systems use issues of racial division to maintain economic control, the NAACP president says. The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the lost cause of the war. The SCV might fly the flag, but we dont associate with them. Its a symbol of our state; its who we are., She continues: Northern people were down here trying to burn all our stuff true; the Yankees torched Jackson three times and we were trying to stop them They didnt think it was right we had slaves. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through itsfollowers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology. Demands for change in American policing have outstripped the 2010s ethos of reform, which for years involved providing more and more resources to bloated police departments: for training that has proved ineffective, body cameras that can and do serve as aids in crafting meretricious narratives, for consent decrees in cities with particularly egregious police regimes that wind up protecting departments more than curbing their atrocities. But one mans prison sentence for a murder seen by millions on camera is a long way from the transformation we need. And in her statement, she acknowledged South Carolinians who insist despite history's evidence to the contrary that the flag is not a racist symbol. ", merits lengthy quotation: It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. Alabama Governor George Wallace who promised to fight for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" began flying the Confederate flag when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy came to Alabama in 1963 to discuss integrating the state's universities. Most (southerners) did not have a dog in the hunt, he says. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longerAmerica and thatthey no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. Add to cart Add to WatchlistUnwatch Watch list is full The first was discarded because it looked too much like the American flag. But you can get better. Across the U.S., a militarized police force and the National Guard prepared to do what they had done so often in the face of ongoing uprisings against police violence: They prepared to brutalize their critics with every weapon they had. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship. They said it should be left up to South Carolina, a position for which McCain later apologized. (Buyenlarge Archive Photos via Getty Images). I go to see and share the bitter end , I have ever held the South were right. If the legislature follows Haley's wishes to move the flag, it will end a conflict that's been going on for more than 40 years. She wonders why the flag is once again becoming a big deal. McCluney has taught history and government for 25 years to mostly black Delta students. Cries for forgiveness and moans of helplessness will fill their dwellings. In the early 1950s, stock car racers, Southern universities, and social groups embraced the Confederate flag, Coski wrote in his book. White mobs at the University of Alabama carried Confederate flags when they threw rocks at Autherine Lucy, the university's first black student, before the university decided to expel her rather than protect her. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. In her speech this week calling for state legislators to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds, Gov. They understand that after all else fails and evil overwhelms the powers of the pen, it is they that will be called upon. Their mentality is flag-draped, all noblesse oblige and wounded besiegement, but their actions are those of armies accountable only to their own leadership. According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates. Here is another choice. By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in 1894, the flag was used to both honor the Confederate dead as well as a romanticized version of the wars purpose. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. I later relay Lindys questions to Genesis Be, a 31-year-old hip-hop artist, public speaker and anti-Confederate flag activist from Biloxi. Chauncey can be followed onTwitterandFacebook. ", it is clearly true that the Americanright isincreasingly willing to accept or condoneviolence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power, more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union, During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller"The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained. The Los Angeles Police Department prepared en masse for protest, should Chauvin be acquitted, as did their colleagues in the New York Police Department across the country. Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, says he wishes poor whites would recognize how powerful politicians have long played racial politics with Confederate emblems a deliberate strategy to divide them from people with shared economic interests. Men who embrace violence. Lindy has thought about our first conversation overnight and wants to understand why I do not support the flag. The protests, he felt, lacked reverence for the police and were awash in animus against them. The phrase the thin blue line is older, perhaps first popularized in 1922 by New York City police Commissioner Richard Enright, who used the phrase to describe police as that intensive battle line, the first line of defense against criminality., By the 1980s, the phrase had gone fully mainstream, propped up by a symbiotic relationship between increasingly powerful urban police departments and sympathetic media; in Errol Morris 1988 film of the same name, a judge told the camera that police were the thin blue line that separates the public from anarchy.. Thelethal attack on the Capitol hadbeenpublicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. After the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, white Southerners used the Confederate flag to intimidate civil rights activists and demonstrate states' willingness to protect segregation at all costs. Thats what states rights were about: protecting slavery, he says. Nonetheless, the police continue to operate under layers of legal impunity and institutional protection that vastly overshadow the rights of the citizens they brutalize, murder or assault. Its lingering still out there.. By the mid-20th century, the flag symbolized white resistance to ending segregation laws. In an average week, they triage 30 referrals from local police, reviewing scenarios in which officers believe a resident is at risk of committing gun violence. , a common flag symbol sometimes called the Southern cross. Expect more of it.. Open a museum?, Ive never heard of an apology from the Klan in Franklin County for harassing and assaulting my family while flying that flag. Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered, fumed a former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began. As a white woman who still . As a white woman who still flies the flag in a historically black South Carolina neighborhood put it, it's about "family history.". Studies have shown that police dont solve most violent crimes: Roughly 40 percent of homicide investigations do not result in arrests, and only 33 percent of rape investigations end in an arrest. I have struggled. A New York Timeseditorial published two days after four girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church claimed segregationists were committing "desecration" of the Confederate symbol. And luckily for all of the others, it is! The South Carolina state Capitol began flying the flag in 1962 and never stopped. Petite Roslyn Stuart is behind the counter with a swagger like she has seen it all more than once. After last week's racially motivated slaying of nine African Americans in a South Carolina church, the flag has become a target for those who consider it a symbol of hatred, a strident reminder. That week, a Thin Blue Line flag was raised defiantly above the Brooklyn Center Police Department building in Minnesota. How much more do we need to do?. It was removed after some legislators felt it could be, "interpreted as anti . Our ancestors fought under that flag, Barnes says. Its not about hatred. He adds that blacks fought for the south, too. The closet is packed with battle re-enactment costumes and weapon replicas. Joe Barnes gets into the truck at his home in Seminary, Mississippi. All Rights Reserved. A minute number of people ever stop to think about the circumstances that surround the very freedoms they spend the majority of their lives enjoying. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. In 1994, the legislature seriously considered a compromise, but it later fell apart. If you dont breathe life into something, it will die, Massey adds. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again perhaps in amore dangerous and virulent form. As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. Chauncey DeVega is a senior politics writer for Salon. In his attic, McCluney downplays slavery ownership saying elite planters, not soldiers, owned most slaves. It goes like this: Police kill a person. It was an historic moment for gay. In response, the Ku Klux Klan surged. Im a pointblank person. Yes, he was. Most of em dont know what it means, she says. (Today, its supporters say the KKK co-opted it.). Ongoing inequities, Be reminds, are bolstered by a kinder, gentler version of Confederate history rewritten after the south lost the civil war and its rights to maintain and extend slavery. Most Confederacy fans may cherry-pick their sides history, but many are more precise about the chinks in the Yankees armor including that not everyone up north was hip to slavery ending, either. Patriot Front is a Texas-based white supremacist group led by Thomas Ryan Rousseau. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. The flying of the flag is not only a reaction to those protesting police after Officer Kim Potter shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright. Who are their enemies? Slavery was sidelined as the war's primary cause in favor of the vaguer term "state's rights" (the right to own slaves). They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. But while white Southern women were draping the flags on the gravestones of the fallen in the early years of Reconstruction, Coski writes, an armed militia of white supremacists in South Carolina was marching with the Confederate battle flag to threaten black residents. The phrase "the thin blue line" is older, perhaps first popularized in 1922 by New York City police Commissioner Richard Enright, who used the phrase to describe police as . Property crime investigations altogether have an abysmal 17 percent clearance rate. This moral truththat the negro is not equal to the white manis exactly what animated Dylann Roof. She supports Mississippians right to keep it as is. The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." (True, but usually for their masters. We just didnt believe in racism. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. Not the main stream core freedoms that our country was founded on, rather the diminutive pieces of thread that weave together to form the very fabric that holds our great nation together. Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, based on the book by James Bradley with Ron Powers; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox; music by Mr.. Nikki Haley spoke of unity. Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in fascist violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence. The police kill a man or a woman; or a teenage girl, in the case of 16-year-old MaKhia Bryant, who was fatally shot by an officer near her home in Columbus, Ohio, shortly before the Chauvin verdict was delivered; or a child, as in the case of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, shot with his hands up in Chicago last month. Google Pay. They're angry. As historian David Blight has argued, the invented memory brought together white Northerners and Southerners to emphasize the valor, courage, and sacrifice of soldiers on both sides. News of another police killing hits before the grieving family has concluded their press conference, and the cycle begins again, until it breaks, or we do. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. Why are these minorities pushing to do away with this flag? That use of the flag is the crux of the "heritage, not hate" argument: that the Confederate flag is simply about honoring the South's past, its dead, and its culture. Sitting quietly in the corner, they wait patiently, hoping for the best but prepared to do the absolute worst. If you can put a rebel flag on it, they do: beach towels, BBQ aprons, windshield dice, coasters, flip-flops, polar fleeces, bikinis, umbrellas and more. The flag that Dylann Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, endorses the violence he committed. Each day passing as the last, each day taken for granted with little to no thought about how fortunate they really are for having in their lives, those that embrace violence. Reconstruction was not a failed attempt at racial equality, but a dangerous mistake. This group understands that not all people can be negotiated with and at then end of the day, human nature is primal. A New Jersey man bought a Confederate flag to oppose the Truman administration in 1951. Police continue to operate under layers of legal impunity and institutional protections. He accurately interpreted the cause of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, men who were too weak to truthfully address that causes natural end. Ira Isonhood adjusts the flag pole in the backyard of his home in Copiah County, Mississippi. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longerAmerica and that, Trump and his regimegave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in. History teaches us that if we dont, someone else will. Violence is Golden by Jack Donovan, Most will see the above admonition and others like it and automatically relate it to the malevolence of those who wish to do nothing more than tear this world apart. 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