- Jim Watson/Getty
- The Confederate flag still flew outside the South Carolina Statehouse as state senator Clementa Pinckney’s funeral procession arrived today.
During a discussion several years ago over renaming Confederate Memorial Hall at Vanderbilt University, a black professor made a shocking statement that might be correct: “The race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless free slaves.”
Coski calls the battle flag the “second American flag” and observes that it represents something real about the south—which is “simultaneously an integral, even fiercely patriotic, part of the country and a distinct, sometimes alienated region that carries the unique burden of having fought and lost a war against the rest of the nation.” As Coski points out, the south hasn’t turned its back on the Stars and Stripes. Northern liberals might recall that during the great campaigns of the 1960s, southern conservatives protested federal civil rights laws by restoring the Confederate battle flag to a place of prominence, while to oppose war protesters, conservatives north and south waved Old Glory.
