A few rambling paragraphs about a meeting in which I end up supporting the Confederate flag
I recently attended a presentation from an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) representative about the AFT’s strategy for the upcoming presidential election season. The speaker was lively and informative. He discussed the current predictions for November’s election, some results from a survey of AFT members about their political views, and the AFT’s plan for getting people out to vote.
As I sit here, the day after I attended the event, writing this essay and thinking about how I want to express my thoughts on the Confederate flag, I can’t help but indulge in flights of fancy.
I imagine shuffling down the sidewalks towards a church for a hastily called meeting. The meeting’s organizers - primarily male pastors and female educators - are working on the best way to take advantage of one of their own being hauled off to jail unjustly for wanting to sit down on a city bus. The meeting would lead to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the rise to prominence of a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. It would be a few years before King truly developed into a transcendent speaker and moral leader. But at the meeting, there would have been glimpses, as I would have heard King say in a speech:
And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.
Now I imagine it’s around 1967 or so. I’m sitting around a long mahogany table in a heavy, padded leather chair with a high curved back. The table is shined well. I can see my reflection (OK, just the outline of a black man’s bald head and his white teeth). Several politicians and their advisors are mulling over strategy. They believe the opposing party has given them a gift they can leverage. One person in that meeting articulated the wildly successful strategy that led to Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and reached its high water mark with Ronald Reagan’s landslide victories in the 1980s.
Here is Lee Atwater articulating what became known as the Southern Strategy in a now infamous interview:
You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger."
Why my brain has decided to send me on a flight of fancy to these very divergent moments in history is beyond me. It’s how my mind works, I guess. In any case, I’m higher on the first meeting than on the second if someone is new to this substack. The commonality between these two meetings was that they were the beginnings of singular political movements.
Do I think this presentation I attended with about 17 middling professors from middling universities listening to a mid-level representative from AFT is historically significant? Will it lead to a singular political movement? Ha. Not likely.
Actually, it’s not too much of a stretch to think someone in the presentation I attended (not me) will end up in another political gathering that will lead to a major political movement.
Maybe one of those people will be Ben Blake, a labor history archivist at the University of Maryland. In the span of five minutes, Ben and I went on a multi-destination conversational excursion, which ended with me offering my thoughts on the prevalence of the Confederate flag in the American South.
We started by talking about how to get students engaged in politics. We moved on to my interest in physical media. I said I wanted to own my movies, as Netflix and Amazon tend to remove my favorites on a whim, at which point Ben played to type and lamented the removal of the labor movie Matewan (he is a labor archivist). It also turns out that Ben is active politically. He relayed to me his experiences protesting at a Trump rally, where he spoke with members of a Russian marching band that had come to play for Trump (what?). Ben started talking about the rise in gun ownership in his hometown in rural Ohio. In response, I said I am seeing more Confederate flags now. And then I said something to the effect of:
I don’t care about people putting up Confederate flags. I get the whole heritage and ancestry thing.
I believe Ben paused ever so briefly. How was he, a white, liberal academic supposed to respond?
I didn’t imagine this happened. This is no longer me fantasizing about being present at a memorable historical moment. No, I really did fix my mouth to support the display of the Confederate flag.
Did I mean what I said?
So here I am, less than 24 hours after that great presentation and my conversation with the archiving, protesting Ben. I’m still mulling over whether I truly believe what I said about the Confederate flag, or was I trying to get a rise out of my interlocutor.
Yeah, I mean what I said.
I want people to be able to celebrate their heritage in the way they wish to celebrate it. This is me applying the notion of lifestyle diversity I’ve mentioned before. As much as I hate driving down I-95 and seeing that humungous Confederate flag splayed out in the North Carolina sky, I want to live in a society where a person can celebrate or revere whatever it is about a flag they find celebratory or reverential.
I’m not being naive, though. I know people are using free speech claims to speak hate and hierarchy. Like seriously, what are you celebrating or revering? What about the Confederacy is so special? Why not celebrate the South in 1912 and hoist the good old First 48? Why not revere the Southern soldiers who fought in the 2oth century wars? We have so many to choose from.
I can’t answer those questions. Only those wishing to celebrate the Confederacy can provide an answer. So, I have their back when it comes to the act of displaying the Confederate flag, even as I question their motives.