“Flag Remains A Point Of Tension”: Confederate Cavalry Robocalls For Cruz
South Carolina has a solid track record of picking the GOP presidential nominee. But if one conservative group has any say in it, the nation’s first Southern primary won’t be a cakewalk for Donald Trump.
According to the Post and Courier, a last minute robocall released by pro-Ted Cruz forces paints the New York real estate titan as a carpetbagger who does not understand their way of life. Trump currently boasts a sizeable lead in nearly every poll and is expected to trounce his opponents in the Palmetto State primary on Saturday, but candidates like Cruz can still hope to narrow the gap.
Courageous Conservative Political Action Committee released a pre-recorded message that all but accuses Trump of attempting to burn through Dixie like General William Tecumseh Sherman. Alluding to the 2015 fight that brought down the Confederate flag, the caller says, “People like Donald Trump are always butting their noses into other people’s business.”
“People like Trump,” of course meaning people with “New York values” who won’t fight for the brand social conservatism one might find in places like Rock Hill or Bethune. The downing of the Confederate flag remains a point of tension for many who believe it embodies their heritage and who reject the notion that it has racial implications.
“Trump talks about our flag like it’s a social disease,” the voice goes on to say.
Pollsters at fivethirtyeight.com give Trump a 78 percent chance of winning. Cruz comes in at a measly 10 percent and—after winning the Iowa caucus—this may be his last opportunity to prove that his candidacy is viable. Despite his recent rise in national polling, the Texas senator appears to be locked in a race for second with at least five in other candidates in South Carolina, particularly Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
The pro-Cruz PAC wants South Carolinians to know that Trump isn’t on their side and that he agreed with removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds.
“Put it in a museum, let it go,” the announcer says, parroting Trump.
Bu the truth is there may not be much that can stop Trump at this point. The pro-Cruz robocall feels like a Hail Mary pass in the fourth quarter, on a fourth down with four seconds left on the clock.
By: Goldie Taylor, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2016
“They Really, Really, Really Don’t Get It”: ‘Heritage Not Hate’? Sorry, White South, They Go Together
On the grass where I sat and played with my friends and family in the Atlanta suburbs, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915. At the time I was none the wiser.
As a child, I would regularly retreat with my family and friends to the comfort of Stone Mountain Park to escape the city life. We’d climb the gigantic quartz rock mountain, and we’d lounge on the grass and gaze at the carvings of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on the mountain’s face. I still have fond memories of watching the celebrated laser show held every Fourth of July at this Southern Mount Rushmore. It was an event that everyone wanted to attend: The fireworks are supposedly the best in the state!
Over the weekend, a pro-Confederate Flag rally was held at Stone Mountain Park and promoted the slogan “Heritage not Hate.” Yet despite the organizer’s best efforts, hatred showed up. A KKK member decided to attend and spew his racist bile, and the pro-Confederate Flag supporters promptly booed him and told him to leave. Likewise, anti-Confederate Flag supporters desecrated the flag, and the “Heritage not Hate” crowd asked them to leave or instructed other supporters to ignore them. Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, an African American, even attended the event with the intent of learning more about the perspectives and values of some of his constituents.
“It challenges me to have a deeper appreciation for people who think differently than I,” said Johnson, as you hear someone yell “racist” in the background of the video. “We may think differently, but as long as we are not hating on each other I think we’re good.”
There were no arrests, and most in attendance said that the event was more peaceful than they anticipated. Yet the relative tranquility is nothing that merits excessive celebration. First of all, a quick browse through Facebook for Confederate Flag rallies will lead the visitor to a volume of hatred and bigotry that we would hope was confined to the past. But second, we’ve already condoned and accepted organized violence and hatred, as long as white Americans are the source, and this is a serious problem.
However, if progress is our aim, we should examine the inherently (yet possibly unintended) oppressive nature of the “Heritage not Hate” message.
The choice of Stone Mountain as the venue shows how celebrating “Heritage not Hate” is impossible. In 1915 the second Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain. (The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by veterans of the Confederate Army and existed until 1870, when the federal government passed the Force Acts, which protected African-American liberties, and suppressed Klan activities.) A year later the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began carving Jackson, Lee, and Davis on the face of the mountain. The UDC’s primary objective may have been to celebrate their forefathers, but to believe now that these women did not hold bigoted beliefs that would be frowned upon today is delusional. Southern heritage and hatred are so interwoven that entertaining the idea that the two can be separated borders on lunacy.
This rally purported that within the Southern context, heritage and hate can be separated, and that collectively we can celebrate a history of white supremacy while ignoring that history’s hatred of non-whites. There is no evidence that this argument holds any water, and it only represents a sad attempt at saving face and perpetuating a false, idyllic narrative of constant white ascension in the United States.
Yet the most offensive aspect of the “Heritage not Hate” argument is how it continues the social standard of limiting Southern black voices with the attempt of reducing us to irrelevancy. Southern culture arose when black Americans were not considered people, and the social norm has always been one in which blacks have had limited agency over their lives. This argument sustains this structure because a Southern heritage must remain about white existence, and nothing else.
I’m not white, and I am as Southern as they come, and in no way does my heritage incorporate a support of white supremacy, racism, or the purity of white existence. My family’s presence in the South has been documented to the late 1700s. I’m from Georgia, my mother’s family is from Charleston, South Carolina—I’ve discussed this ancestry in a previous Daily Beast piece—and my father’s family is from Alabama, but we know his ancestors were bought in Savannah, Georgia.
My family’s Southern heritage more closely echoes the shooting at Emanuel AME Church and the recent vandalism at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—where Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized and became co-pastor—where four Confederate battle flags were found on Thursday.
“This is the same as placing a swastika on the campus of a Jewish temple. Whatever the message was, clearly is not about heritage, but about hate,” said Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. “It was disturbing and sickening, but unfortunately not terribly surprising. We’ve seen this kind of ugliness before.”
This is the Southern heritage that black Americans are acquainted with, but this perspective is missing in the “Heritage not Hate” argument. This absence perpetuates the continuation of a society and a narrative where black lives and black voices hold no agency and are pushed to the borders of irrelevancy. They encourage our expunging from the past and the present.
Southern black congressmen are welcomed to attend “Heritage not Hate” rallies at the location of the second founding of the KKK, but the idea is that they have an obligation to learn about the struggles and complexity of whiteness in the South. There is an assumption that no one in attendance wants to hear the narrative of a black Southerner because it is known that this story will contradict and erode the foundations of the rally and the entire movement.
I’m black and a Southerner and my heritage is one filled with hate—and not a hatred that emanates from my family. The hatred could have originated from the Confederacy, the KKK, and/or nondescript white Southerners who attacked and vandalized churches, spewed racial epithets, murdered black Americans or prevented us from finding housing and employment. All of these actions are spawned from the same notion of white supremacy, but with different names. They are constantly interwoven and inseparable from one another. This is not a discussion about semantics, but one about a society that has condoned hatred, terror, and black irrelevancy.
I’m not irrelevant. I do not terrorize those who are different than I am, and I do not hate the South, despite the horrors of Southern life inflicted upon black Americans. I’m as Southern as they come regardless of how comfortable that makes me feel.
By: Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast, August 5, 2015
“Let’s Make The Confederate Flag A Hate Crime”: It Is The American Swastika And We Should Recoil From It In Horror
Early Thursday morning, the State House of South Carolina voted to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State Capitol. Gov. Nikki Haley has pledged to sign the bill immediately, and the flag may come down as soon as today.
Frederick Douglass, the former slave who escaped to freedom, and became a major abolitionist and civil rights leader a century and a half ago, foresaw this day. But he foresaw, too, that it would be a long time coming.
Speaking in Boston just days before the South surrendered at the end of the Civil War, Douglass warned that the North’s victory would not mean that that war had truly ended: “That enmity will not die out in a year, will not die out in an age,” he predicted.
As a former southerner himself, Douglass knew just how deep allegiance to the Southern slave-holding culture went. He declared:
“I believe that when the tall heads of this Rebellion shall have been swept down, you will see those traitors, handing down, from sire to son, the same malignant spirit which they have manifested, and which they are now exhibiting, with malicious hearts, broad blades, and bloody hands in the field, against our sons and brothers.”
Six years later, in 1871, Douglass wrote that, “A rebellion is upon our hands today far more difficult to deal with than that suppressed, but not annihilated, in 1865.” He was speaking of the rising wave of mob violence and terrorism directed against African Americans all across the region. Like a “pestilence,” Douglass observed, “this last form of the rebellion – covert, insidious, secret, striking in the darkness of night, while assuming spotless robes of loyalty in the day – is far more difficult to deal with than an open foe.”
Has the age of “enmity” finally ended? Has the “malignant spirit” finally died away? Has the “pestilence” finally abated?
The answer to all of these questions is “no.” The hateful actions of Dylann Roof remind us of that. So do the white supremacist websites Roof found appealing. So do the many Confederate flags displayed in places across the South — and beyond — today, emblazoning T-shirts, affixed to car bumpers, and worn as lapel pins in business suits.
The heritage these flags stand for was a bloody war initiated by the South. Those Southerners who fired the first shots to attack U.S. troops at Fort Sumter – just a mile or two from the church where Roof gunned down nine black worshippers – aimed not only to “defend” slavery, but to promote slavery’s spread across the nation, especially in the West. The defeat of the South was the defeat of the slavery system.
That defeat is still mourned by many sympathizers with the Confederate cause across the nation, who have somehow forgotten that the Lost Cause was the cause of slavery. To them, the Confederate flag is an innocent symbol, a symbol that honors the Confederate dead and preserves the memory of their gallantry and fighting spirit.
To black Americans, meanwhile, these flags send a clear, painful, and frightening message:You don’t belong here. By being here, you are in danger. This nation is not for you. It was no coincidence that those who opposed the civil rights movement for desegregation and integration across America began to resurrect the use of the flag in the 1950s and 1960s.
Americans who refuse to acknowledge the connection between the Confederate flag and the horrors of slavery and white supremacy are still in the grip of a “malignant spirit” handed down from generation to generation from 1865 to this day.
It is a fine thing that the Confederate flag will no longer fly above the South Carolina state capitol. But displaying the Confederate flag anywhere is, at bottom, an act of hate. It should be recognized as such, and punished as a hate crime.
Given the millions who suffered under the whip of slave masters, and all the families separated as slave traders sold sons and daughters away from their parents, and wives away from their husbands, All Americans should recoil from the Confederate flag with the same horror we feel for the Nazi swastika.
That, I feel confident, is what Frederick Douglass would think.
By: Nick Bromell, Salon, July 11, 2015
“Confederate Flag Treated Like Fallen Hero”: Many Still Miss The Point Of What The Confederacy Stood For
In June, the South Carolina Highway Patrol honor guard carried the mortal remains of the murdered Sen. Clementa Pinckney up the State House steps and into the rotunda.
Members of the honor guard flanked the open coffin, spit polished and erect, eyes straight ahead in a silent show of respect as thousands of mourners filed past. A black cloth had been draped over one of the windows to spare anyone who might be offended by the Confederate battle flag flying out front.
A bill called the Heritage Act passed in this very building prevented the flag from being lowered even to half-staff, much less taken down without a two-thirds vote of the legislature.
But on Thursday, the legislature voted to do just that and set a 24-hour deadline on having it done.
On Friday, the honor guard returned, this time to lower the Confederate battle flag, which had been designed by William Porcher Miles, a onetime mayor of Charleston who had been a prominent “fire-eater,” as the most ardent proponents of slavery and secession leading up to the Civil War were called.
The honor guard had performed countless other ceremonies, but this one was a little different. And they had not been given much time to work out exactly how it should go.
The flag was being taken down in the first place because it was seen by many people—African-Americans in particular—as a hateful symbol of slavery and oppression. Some rightly view it as a shameful banner of treason.
But it had been hoisted there in the first place because it is viewed by others—none of them African-Americans—as a symbol of an idealized heritage and history.
And the very fact that the honor guard had been chosen to lower it was an implicit nod to those people.
At the appointed time on Friday morning, the guard went about lowering the flag with the same ritualistic respect as it would with the Stars and Stripes.
Two of the officers took the lowered banner in their white gloved hands.
And for a moment, it seemed as if they might fold it as they would an American flag that had covered the coffin of a fellow cop or a U.S. solider who had made the supreme sacrifice.
Instead, they rolled it, presumably an echo of the way Confederate regiments furled their battle flags in surrender at the end of the Civil War.
A black sergeant was the one who then took the furled banner. He had done this at American flag ceremonies where race was not issue, but it was hard to believe that he had been chosen by chance in this instance.
He seemed to be an attempt to compensate for the bigotry associated with what he now carried so solemnly over to the State House steps. The director of the South Carolina Relic Room and Military Museum waited to receive it.
For a second, truly terrible moment, the ritual was too much like that performed when the flag from a hero’s coffin is presented to a grieving loved one along with the words, “On behalf of a grateful nation.…”
Thankfully, the sergeant uttered not a word. The director, Allen Roberson, was also silent as he took the furled flag.
“Nothing was said,” Roberson later told The Daily Beast. “I felt like that was appropriate.”
Roberson was escorted up into the State House.
“I just wanted to make sure I didn’t trip when I was carrying the flag,” he recalled.
He then descended to the basement, where an armored car was waiting to transport the flag to the museum.
Upon arriving, Roberson brought the flag in through a back door. The flag was unrolled, smoothed and carefully folded.
“So it wouldn’t crease,” Roberson said.
The museum’s registrar, Rachel Cockrell, and an intern named John Faulkenberry placed it in an “acid-free textile storage box, padded with acid-free tissue.” The box was stored in the museum’s “secure, climate-controlled Artifact Storage area.”
“Locked and alarmed,” Roberson said.
Roberson dismissed as not entirely accurate reports that there had been a tacit agreement as part of a legislative compromise to store the flag in a multimillion-dollar facility funded by the taxpayers—which would include, necessarily, the descendants of slaves.
He allowed that there had been some brainstorming with various architects and planners, but nothing had been decided and whatever was ultimately done would not likely be so grand.
He noted that he has not been able to get added funding for anything in recent years.
“Our budget has not increased at all,” he said.
Back at the State House, the flagpole where the banner had flown was now bare, but a monument to the Confederate dead remained. The inscription on the north side reads:
“This monument
perpetuates the memory,
of those who
true to the instincts of their birth,
faithful to the teachings of their fathers,
constant in their love for the State,
died in the performance of their duty:
Who
have glorified a fallen cause
by the simple manhood of their lives,
the patient endurance of suffering,
and the heroism of death,
and who,
in the dark house of imprisonment,
in the hopelessness of the hospital,
in the short, sharp agony of the field
found support and consolation
in the belief
that at home they would not be forgotten.
Unveiled May 13, 1879”
The fallen cause they glorified included sedition and slavery. The people at home included slaves who had suffered horrors that outdid even war.
There is also an inscription on the north side:
“Let the stranger,
who may in the future times
read this inscription,
recognize that these were men
whom power could not corrupt,
whom death could not terrify,
whom defeat could not dishonor
and let their virtues plead
for just judgment
of the cause in which they perished.
Let the South Carolinian
of another generation
remember
that the State taught them
how to live and how to die.
And that from her broken fortunes
she has preserved for her children
the priceless treasure of their memories,
teaching all who may claim
the same birthright
that truth, courage and patriotism
endure forever.”
The truth is they died fighting to deny fellow human beings the right to life and liberty. Their legacy is racism and hate.
The flowery falsehoods on the monument remain, now that the flag has been taken down in somber ceremony with white gloved hands and tucked safely away by a very nice museum director in an acid-free box, locked and alarmed.
By: Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, July 11, 2015
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