The South Needs New Symbols

Five years ago, roughly twelve months after the Charleston shooting, I was driving from Baton Rouge to the Florida panhandle ahead of the Fourth of July. It was a brilliant afternoon—clear and sunny and scorching—and the gulf water sparkled on those stretches where it was in view. Somewhere, most likely near Mobile or Pensacola, I was crossing an inlet while a speedboat passed beneath me, skimming hard through the sharp tips of low-rising waves. There was a small group of people on that boat—maybe half a dozen, all looking to be about my age (I’d recently graduated college). From the back of it flew a large flag. The Confederate battle flag. The one you think of when you think of the Confederate flag.

There was an anger, then, a tightening of some spring in my stomach and my throat, and I mf’d them quietly to myself, somewhat surprised at my own rage. “Stupid” was the word that kept coming up, because it seemed so stupid to, at the start of a weekend ostensibly spent celebrating the Fourth of July and through it the United States of America, celebrate the Confederacy alongside it. The gravest enemy the United States ever faced. The enemy within.

That image comes to my mind often when I think of Confederate flags and statues, sometimes bringing me anger, sometimes bringing me sadness, often bringing me both. This weekend, it tends towards the sad. Memorial Day, after all, arose out of the aftermath of the Civil War—the war that killed more than 600,000 people because a collection of Americans refused to stop enslaving their fellow men and women. As we wrote earlier this week:

There’s a popular myth that “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery,” but these states’ own declarations of secession, adopted at the beginning of the war, rip through this falsehood rather thoroughly. Here are five of those declarations: Georgia’s, which makes mention of slavery 35 times, beginning in the declaration’s second sentence; Mississippi’s, which mentions slavery seven times, beginning in its second sentence; South Carolina’s, which mentions it 18 times, beginning in the first sentence; Texas’s, which mentions it 22 times despite only first mentioning it in the third paragraph; and Virginia’s, which only mentions it once but offers no other reasons for its attempt to leave the United States.

It seems to me that there are two general categories of Confederate flag-waving. The smaller of the two is open racism, often coalesced with other brands of hatred. The use of the flag at the January 6^th invasion of the Capitol falls under this bucket. The larger, the much larger, the massively larger, seems to be as an expression of pride—pride in The South.

I love the South. It sounds hokey, but I love pretty much all of this country—virtually all of it I’ve seen (I’ve never been to Alaska). The South is no different. I love the rolling green of Mississippi. I love the soaring pines of Alabama. I love the marshy coast of South Carolina, and the small and potent vigor of Atlanta, and sweet tea and thoroughly sauced barbecue and a good, hot, humid day. I’m proud of my own region, too. I understand that instinct for regional pride. In the Midwest, there’s no equivalent to the Confederate battle flag or other Confederate imagery (we never went to war with the United States, and the creation of any symbol for ourselves would be rather un-Midwestern), but that pride is there. Quieter (again, the more Midwestern way), and looser (never hardened by the crucible of open aggravation, from war to the Civil Rights movement to this current culture war), but there. We need to lose the Confederate flag, and we of course need it to happen voluntarily, or else it won’t really be lost, but that pride so many wish to express in The South should remain. Because it can be a healthy pride. It often is, in so many ways, a healthy pride.

The problem, of course, is that trying to replace the Confederate flag with something else runs the risk of being laughably corny, or of being cringily divisive (I have an image in my head of the New York Times starting to push some “new flag of the South” and a bunch of Buckhead liberals flying it while nobody else flies it and utterly defeating the purpose of the whole endeavor and somehow making the whole thing worse). I’m not sure there’s a way to broadly replace the Confederate flag. But I do wonder if subtly, and slowly, people can turn away from it in favor of other symbols.

Mississippi has a new state flag. It’s beautiful. It removed the Confederate battle flag that adorned its old official banner and started from scratch, with a magnolia now in the center. A magnolia. Beautiful, natural, of the earth, and specifically of the Southern earth. I don’t know what the reception has been from those who opposed the old flag’s removal. I hope they feel pride in their new flag. I think they should. It’s a beautiful flag:

I wonder if actions like this are the answer. Small actions, seismically, but specific ones, ones that target Confederate images and replace them not with some “new South” but with just the South, the South that people know, the pieces of the South independent of the intolerable historic and present flaws (and let me be clear that the South is not alone in possessing intolerable flaws, as we’ve seen recently in Chicago and Kenosha and Minneapolis in my native corner of the world). The South doesn’t need a new flag. But efforts to embrace symbols other than the Confederate battle flag might be successful. Perhaps slowly. Perhaps never all the way. But in a sizable enough manner to marginalize the Confederate battle flag to its proper place of shame and disgust, without shaming or treating with disgust the pride people feel for their home. I’m thinking of the magnolia in Mississippi. The pine in Alabama. The peach in Georgia, because the peanut is not exactly beautiful. The guitar in Central Tennessee and the Saxophone in West Tennessee and perhaps the black bear in East Tennessee, and I don’t know what in the Carolinas or Virginia or Arkansas but there must be something in those places too, Southern and beautiful and free of the bloodshed staining that old banner crimson.

There are bigger issues in America’s race relations than flags and statues. I’m aware of this. But the unwillingness of the losers to move on from the Civil War has held us back for 156 years, and it continues to hold us back from unity and peace. And I wonder if new symbols might help. Not, again, symbols of a new South, but symbols of the South we know and love. A South in which pride should be felt.