No matter where you grew up in the United States, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Confederate flag. Perhaps on a bumper sticker or license plate, or hanging outside a home or government building. You may have seen it at school, like 15-year-old Aleah Crawford, when in 2019, she led a protest to ban the rebel flag as part of the dress code. If you haven’t seen it, and don’t know much about it, now is the time to be informed. That’s because this flag has a particularly controversial place in US history.
“People find the flag offensive because they understand the message it is meant to convey,” says Dr. William Horne, postdoctoral fellow at Villanova University and co-founder & editor of The Activist History Review. “White Americans deploy the flag to communicate specific ideas about white supremacy and racial hierarchy that formed the basis of the Confederacy.”
The version of the Confederate flag you may have seen is actually the third version that was made. Today’s Confederate flag has a red background with blue bars in the shape of an X that displays 13 white stars. These white stars represent the 13 states of the Confederacy — the group of 13 southern states that fought against the United States during the Civil War.
But here’s where the controversy starts: the original version of the Confederate flag was said to be too similar to the U.S. flag, so it was redesigned. In that redesign, a white background was used, which was said to represent “the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race,” according to Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson. That’s why many consider the Confederate flag to be offensive and racist, especially since it’s more recently been adopted as a symbol for hate groups.
What is the history of the Confederate flag?
During the Civil War, the Confederate flag was the battle flag flown by several Confederate armies. One of those armies was led by General Robert E. Lee — an often romanticized figure in U.S. history. Lee led an army whose soldiers kidnapped free Black farmers and sold them into slavery, encouraged the beating of slaves who tried to escape, and fought to protect the institution of slavery.
With his surrender at Appomattox Court House, the Civil War came to an end. At that time, Lee distanced himself from the rebel flag, saying, “I think it wisest not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”
Yet after his death, the Confederate flag became widely used by various groups and organizations that opposed civil rights.
How was the Confederate flag used post-Civil War?
The Dixiecrat political party, founded in 1948 and composed of White Southern Democrats who advocated for racial segregation, used the Confederate flag as their symbol to represent resistance to the federal government — meaning resistance to civil rights being granted to Black people. It has also been used throughout the decades by white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
In 1956, two years after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had declared school segregation to be illegal, the state of Georgia incorporated the battle flag into its official state flag as a symbol of resistance to integration. In 1960, when six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black child to attend an all-white school in the South, she was met by crowds of white people who threw stones at her, called her the N-word, and waved the Confederate flag.
“White Southerners did not so much reinterpret the meaning of the flag as much as they rediscovered a meaning that had always been present going back to the war itself,” wrote Civil War historian Kevin Levin in a 2016 article about the flag for The Daily Beast.
How is the Confederate Flag used today?
Today, the Confederate flag’s history centers less around its early beginnings and more on its use as a rebel flag. It’s widely used to represent opposition to equity among all races and creeds. That’s why many people opposed the fact that the Confederate flag was flown above the statehouse in South Carolina for many years. Dylann Roof — the 21-year-old who shot and killed nine Black people in a Charleston church in June 2015 and had expressed his desire to start a “race war” — was photographed stomping and burning the American flag and waving the Confederate flag.
Roof’s brutal act renewed debate about the flag’s meaning and use in public spaces. In response to the shooting, activist Bree Newsome ripped down the flag at South Carolina’s statehouse before it was permanently taken down weeks after the shootings.
The following year, in May 2016, the U.S. House banned Confederate flags from being flown at cemeteries run by the Veterans Administration. In addition, major retailers, including Wal-Mart, eBay, and Sears stopped selling it, and various flag manufacturers have also ceased production of it.
Despite these changes, there are still Confederate flag defenders who insist that the answer to the question, “Is the Confederate flag racist?” is no. In December 2019, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina Governor and United Nations ambassador (who actually ordered the flag removed from the Charleston statehouse), was criticized after saying Roof “hijacked” the Confederate flag, and that to the people of South Carolina, the flag represented “service and sacrifice and heritage.”
What heritage does the Confederate flag honor?
White Southerners who support the use of the flag say it’s representative of their Southern heritage. But for many African Americans, the rebel flag is a symbol of their Southern heritage as well: one of terror, torture, and oppression. They interpret the flag the same way Roof did, and presumably the same way as those who waved the flag during the Civil War, during the Civil Rights Movement that followed, and at present-day events like Charlottesville and MAGA rallies. In honoring their ancestors with that flag, Black civil rights leaders say White Americans are honoring the pain and suffering that Black Americans’ ancestors endured and continue to endure more than 150 years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Originally published on 2021-05-28
Author: Jameelah Nasheed
Source: TeenVogue
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The American media specializes in fake news. Indeed, since the Clinton regime the American media has produced nothing but fake news. Do you remember the illegal US bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia? Do you remember “war criminal” Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president branded “the butcher of the Balkans,” who was compared to Hitler until Hillary passed the title on to the President of Russia? Milosevic, not Bill Clinton, was arrested and placed on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. He died in prison, some say murdered, before he was cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal. http://www.globalresearch.ca/milosevic-and-the-destruction-of-yugoslavia-unpleasant-truths-no-one-wants-to-know/5540873 Do you ...
The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...
Needless to say, the important and portentous story of the attempted subversion of the Orthodox Church using the intelligence and political instruments still at the disposal of the moribund post-Christian West has gone virtually unreported, uncommented, and uncondemned. It concerns the multi-front offensive currently being unleashed against the most ancient and authentic Christian communion, the Orthodox Church.The epicenter of this externally induced commotion is at this moment in Montenegro, NATO’s latest “catch” in its persistent effort to secure or at least neutralize the Balkan rear, with a view to the projected conflict with Russia. One of the major remaining targets in ...
Hardly any knowledgeable person doubts that Zionist ideology is the purest form of racism. Zionism is Jewish disguised racism as a raison d’etat. Israel comes right after the U. S., as far as racism is concerned. That is why the U. S. donates to this racist regime $ 3.8 bn per year in order to keep this occupation regime going. Should anybody doubt the racism of the Israeli leadership, read the following article.[1]Racism among the Israeli leadership is legendary. It started out with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saying: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it ...
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam and, in the modern world, a bulwark against western colonialism.Over a hundred years after he left power, after the Empire was broken up by the western powers after the First World War, after the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, ...
The edifice of the post-1991 world order is collapsing right before our eyes. President Putin’s decision to give a miss to the Auschwitz pilgrimage, right after his absence in Paris at Charlie festival, gave it the last shove. It was good clean fun to troll Russia, as long as she stayed the course. Not anymore. Russia broke the rules.Until now, Russia, like a country bumpkin in Eton, tried to belong. It attended the gathering of the grandees where it was shunned, paid its dues to European bodies that condemned it, patiently suffered ceaseless hectoring of the great powers and irritating baiting of the East European small-timers alike. But something broke there. The lad does ...
Uncovering the Western mainstream mass-media lies on Ukraine.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2014.On Monday [October 13 2014], America’s government offices, businesses, and banks all grind to a halt in order to commemorate Columbus Day. In schools up and down the country, little children are taught that a heroic Italian explorer discovered America, and various events and parades are held to celebrate the occasion.It has now become common knowledge amongst academics that Christopher Columbus clearly did not discover America, not least because is it impossible to discover a people and a continent that was already there and thriving with culture. One can only wonder how ...
The grandees of the Republican Party are on the ropes. Donald Trump has them by the balls, but, even without Trump, they would be in what Bush the Father would call deep “do-do.”Any Republican candidate for President whom two-thirds of the electorate could abide would be anathema to the one-third that Republicans have recruited into their rank and file. Mitt Romney was the final straw.The establishment’s situation is so pitiful that even Chris Christie is starting to look good to them. If his candidacy survives into the Spring, late night TV comedians will rejoice; others, not so much.Ted Cruz remains ...
BALTOPS 16 is a military exercise now taking place between June 3 and June 18 in the Baltic Sea region which is in close proximity to Russia. The U.S. Naval Institute (www.usni.org) released an article titled ‘Analysis: Larger NATO Baltic Sea Exercise Sends Important Message to Russia’ stated what BALTOPS 16 will consist of:Over the next three weeks BALTOPS 16 will draw together some 6,000 personnel, 45 warships, and 60 aircraft from 17 nations, including the United States, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, along with the littoral states of the Baltic States who are NATO members (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, ...
Unfathomable as that may appear, yes, it was quite possible for the second-ranking slaughterhouse in Europe in recent memory to have slipped off the radar screen. Even such a renowned authority as Professor Gideon Greif is having an exceptionally difficult time of it in trying to put it back on.Precisely because it has not been the theme of any Hollywood spectaculars, Jasenovac does not attract any school excursions and textbooks are largely silent about it. Some background information on Jasenovac therefore seems like a good place to start.The Jasenovac death camp (1941 – 1945) is inextricably bound up with the ...
“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defences, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong, the right. In a country where ...
In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and ...
The Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected offers by the Nazi Germany to lead the new government. On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaša, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The new Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by ...
As was expected, President Trump has decertified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal or, to give it its full name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite the fact that he certified it twice before. As recently as 14 September 2017, Trump also waived certain sanctions against Iran as required under the terms of the deal. Yet, in an extremely belligerent and hostile speech, he put out his new policy towards Iran.The certification of the deal is not part of the agreement, but as anti-Iranian hawks in both parties wanted to undermine President Barrack Obama and create obstacles on ...
SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is elating after his right-wing Likud Party secured a firm victory in the Israeli elections on March 17. It was a very close race against the Zionist Union Party, led by Isaac Herzog. Our next guest, Shir Hever, in an interview he did with us last month, predicted that Prime Minister Netanyahu would win in spite of many strikes against him at the time. So, defying election polls leading up to the election, Prime Minister Netanyahu has ...
Destroyed Serbian Orthodox Christian Church of Samodrezha (built at the end of the 14th century) by Muslim Albanians in Kosovo after June 1999Photo evidence of Jihadization of Kosovo & Metochia by Muslim Albanians from June 1999 onward. Kosovo after June 1999 when became occupied by NATO troops became the first world's ISIS/ISIL.The EuroChristian culture of the ethnic Serbs is systematically destroyed like today in the Middle East for the reason to create pure Islamic state. At the same time Kosovo & Metochia is becoming overwhelmingly Islamized with ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanians especially of the Christian Serbs.Click the links to ...
Editor's note: Originally posted on 2016-01-11Serbia entered on December 14th, 2015 a final stage of negotiations with Brussels on the EU's membership. It is known, however, that the EU gave an informal ultimatum to Serbia to recognize Kosovo’s independence for the exchange of becoming a full Member State of the EU. The western (the USA/EU) client Serbia’s Government is currently under the direct pressure from Brussels to recognize an independence of the narco-mafia Kosovo’s quasi state or to give up an idea to join the EU. It is only a question when a western colony of Serbia has to finally ...
“In the event of a nuclear war, there will be no chances, there will be no survivors – all will be obliterated… nuclear devastation is not science fiction – it is a matter of fact. The world now stands on the brink of the final abyss. Let us all resolve to take all possible practical steps to ensure that we do not, through our own folly, go over the edge.” Former First Sea Lord, Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979) Strasbourg, 11 May 1979.”As US threats ratchet up towards North Korea, the latest hinging on the accusation that the country attempted a ...
What must the world think watching the US presidential campaign? Over time US political campaigns have become more unreal and less related to voters’ concerns, but the current one is so unreal as to be absurd.The offshoring of American jobs by global corporations and the deregulation of the US financial system have resulted in American economic failure. One might think that this would be an issue in a presidential campaign.The neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony is driving the US and its vassals into conflict with Russia and China. The risks of nuclear war are higher than at any previous ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
