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 Argentinian authorities are wondering about the massive purchase of land in Patagonia by a British billionaire, and the “holidays” that tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are enjoying on his property.In the 19th century, the British government were undecided as to where they should settle Israel – either in what is now Uganda, in Argentina or in Palestine. In fact, Argentina was at that time controlled by the United Kingdom and, on the initiative of French baron Maurice de Hirsch, had become a land of refuge for Jews who were fleeing the pogroms in central Europe.In the 20th century, ...
Media Lies and the Conquest of Kosovo: NATO’s Prototype for the Next Wars of Globalization. Publisher: Unwritten History, Inc., New York, 2007. By Michel Collon, 276 pages, with photographs and maps.“Each war begins with media lies.” This is how Belgian journalist Michel Collon begins his analysis of the Kosovo conflict which resulted in the U.S. and NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the subsequent occupation of the Serbian Kosovo province by U.S. and NATO troops. The U.S. and NATO had launched a war of aggression without United Nations approval and in violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of ...
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
Magnum Crimen the book about clericalism in Croatia from the end of 19th century until the end of the Second World War.The book, whose full title is Magnum crimen – pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj (The Great Crime – a half-century of clericalism in Croatia), was written by a former Catholic priest and professor and historian at Belgrade University, Viktor Novak (1889–1977). The book was first published in Zagreb in 1948.Immediately after the book was published, the Vatican Curia placed this book on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (English: List of Prohibited Books) and pronounced anathema against the author.BackgroundNovak wrote a ...
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.
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as Pete Seeger satirized it, and then pushing on regardless, all came down to “credibility”: the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved ...
The Ploesti old fields in southeastern Romania were a vital strategic bombing objective for the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. Located 35 miles north of the capital Bucharest, Ploesti had formerly supplied one-third of Germany’s oil. The U.S. had targeted Ploesti to deprive the German military of petroleum. The U.S. first bombed Ploesti on June 12, 1942 during the HALPRO bombing raid. Then on August 1, 1943 during Operation Tidal Wave, a major bombardment was launched.The Soviet Red Army advance on Yugoslavia and the capital Belgrade in 1944 was launched from Romania. Russian troops had captured Ploesti ...
U.S. media have given more attention to hearsay allegations of Julian Assange’s sexual encounters with two talkative Swedish women than to an official report accusing Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci of running a criminal enterprise which, among almost every other crime in the book, has murdered prisoners in order to sell their vital organs on the world market.The report by Swiss liberal Dick Marty was mandated two years ago by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). Not to be confused with the European Union, the Council of Europe was founded in 1949 to promote human rights, the ...
It is now clear that on 14 April 2018, the three Governments of U.S., UK, and France, fired over a hundred missiles against Syria, on no more 'justification' than staged videos that had been done by those regimes' own proxy boots-on-the-ground fighters in Syria, who are trying to overthrow Syria's existing, non-sectarian Government and replace it by a Sharia-law regime that would be selected by agents of Saudi Arabia's ruling family. In other words: the fighters whom the U.S., UK, and France, had been arming and training, had themselves created this pretext of a faked 'gas attack' having been perpetrated ...
On the 70th anniversary of Tokyo’s fire bombing, relatives are asking for a real tribute to its victims.It was just after midnight when the rumble of B-29 bombers was heard, jolting Tokyo awake. The incendiaries that fell from their bellies, full of jelly petroleum, were like nothing anyone had ever seen.They turned canals and rivers into flame and if the jelly stuck to you, it kept burning till flesh turned to bone. “The planes filled the sky like dragonflies,” recalls Michiko Kiyoka. “Everywhere you looked there were charred bodies.”Today, Ms Kiyoka, now 91, will join a small group of elderly ...
In the latest episode in the never-ending series of indignities, calamities, and disasters to be visited upon the heads of the world’s millions of suffering and desperate refugees, they are now being stabbed in the back by the one leader of an affluent NATO country who had risked any political capital to help a substantial number of them, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.At the height of the refugee wave from NATO war zones into Turkey and Europe a couple of years ago, Merkel opened the borders and allowed nearly a million refugees into Germany. Although she is a conservative woman and ...
To gauge the transformation in the response by the U.S. military, the mainstream media and the public to a U.S. war crime, one need only compare the reactions to two of the most heinous American crimes: the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the gunning down of innocent Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007.The latter was captured on a cockpit video from attacking Apache helicopters and revealed in a video released by WikiLeaks ten years ago today. Wikileaks obtained the video from a conscientious U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning. The My Lai incident was revealed to the public ...
Why Does America Keep “Losing” Its Wars?Below, we demonstrate that the U.S. keeps “losing” war after war.There are 3 potential reasons this might be happening: Is this chaos an intentional way to implement regime change and grab resources? Or is this a sign of the decline of the American empire … and we just can’t win a war anymore? Or do those in charge just not really give a damn about winning … and are they just focusing on one short-term goal after another?We’ll let you decide why you think this keeps happening. But if you don’t believe that the ...
We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy ...
The United States is indisputably the world’s most frequent and extensive wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from under the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an innocent victim. It has no holiday to keep any victorious battle in everyone’s mind. It has a holiday to remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — and now also one, perhaps holier still, to recall, not the “shock and awe” destruction of Baghdad, but the crimes of September 11, 2001, ...
Every day signs are looming larger than life as we know it in the wealthiest nation on earth that it’s about to crash and burn, forever changing not for the better. The latest wake-up call arrived in a Guardian article earlier this week. The story features a secret prison not unlike the CIA torture detention centers all over the world whereby the Chicago police hold rounded up US citizens for hours or days at a time for interrogation. The same internationally illegal roundups of suspected “potential terrorists” (which by latest Gestapo America standards can easily be you or me) that the CIA ...
It’s all over but the postmortems. Trump and Clinton are their parties’ presumptive nominees. Choice for voters in November amounts to death by hanging or firing squad. Democracy is pure fantasy. None whatever exists. Trump was the last GOP aspirant left standing after all others dropped out, an unlikely choice, a surprise winner, prevailing despite party bosses opposing him.Democrat power brokers chose Clinton before primary/caucus season began. The race was over before it started.Voters in November get to choose between a dirty business as usual billionaire racist, demagogue and a recklessly dangerous neocon racketeer, war criminal, Wall Street tool she ...
According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it ...
‘Blowing from a Gun’ depicted by Vasily Vereshchagin in his painting ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’ on the rebellion of 1857. Queen Victoria’s agent bought this painting, in an attempt to suppress it. ‘Blowing from the Gun’ was a means of execution where the prisoner is tied to the muzzle of a cannon, which is then fired, popping the victim’s head about 15 meters (50 feet) into the air, apparently a sort of juvenile entertainment for the colonizers.Following colonization, along came ‘decolonization’ and what do you suppose happened with colonial borders? They mostly remained as laid down ...
The great deception of “a real democracy” in the Ukraine, which the New York Times insisted on 31 March 2019, shows little sign of relenting. For five years, Western populations have been consistently misled through skewed and slanted reporting, assuring the readership that what is unfolding in Kiev is a “fledgling democracy”, as a Washington Post editorial further outlined on 6 April 2019.In reality it was a United States-funded coup d’état. During the months prior to Viktor Yanukovych‘s February 2014 ousting, elite American organizations bankrolled the “anti-government protests”, revealed as much in December 2013 by Victoria Nuland, then a high ...