By: Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
The controversy of recent years about the Confederate flag—whether it is a symbol of honor, as some claim, or a symbol of infamy, as others do, is a prime example of the trouble historical ignorance can produce.
That trouble has now cropped up in Missouri, where Governor Matt Blunt ordered that the Confederate flag be flown on June 5th at a memorial service some 400 people held at a Confederate cemetery in that state.
Governor Blunt said he was acting at the request of a state legislator who represents the district where the service—timed to coincide with the June 3rd birthday of Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy—was held.
The Governor's order was issued quietly. But once leaders of the Missouri National Association for the Advancement of Colored People heard about it, they—quite properly—registered a strong objection and staged a brief march at the Governor's Mansion to make their objections more visible.
"We have many, many pressing issues on our agenda—jobs and economic development, better health care, and so on," said Harold Crumpton, president of the St. Louis NAACP. "But we cannot stand by and accept this objectionable symbol being flown on state property."
Crumpton emphasized that the NAACP was not trying to prevent private citizens from holding a ceremony at the Confederate cemetery. Their point is that the state should not in any way be a party to it. Referring to Governor Blunt's Republican affiliation, he said, "Abraham Lincoln opposed this flag and what it represented. How can any Republican today claim that he was wrong?"
According to news reports, a spokesman said the Governor favored a scholarly review of whether it would be appropriate to fly the Confederate flag at the site.
I for one welcome more and more honest scholarship about the Confederate flag and the rebellion and leaders who brought it into being—precisely because it's become fashionable once again in some quarters to pretend there's no "truth" about what the various flags of the Confederacy stand for, that it's simply an issue about which reasonable people can disagree.
This, of course, is nonsense. We've long known enough to have no doubt what the Confederacy and its various flags represented.
They stand for not just the maintenance, but the expansion of Negro Slavery, and the rule of the most despicable concepts of human relations human beings have ever devised.
The facts of Negro Slavery and the words, written and spoken, of the leaders of the Confederate rebellion make this clear.
One fact is Slavery's importance to the entire country's economic foundation.
As scholar James Oliver Horton noted in the recent Public Broadcasting Service documentary, "Slavery and the Making of America," by 1840 the value of cotton exports was greater than the combined value of all of the nation's other exports. That made slaves the most valuable "asset" of the United States other than the land itself.
Their value was confirmed, for example, by the five "negro (sic) slavery clauses" of the Confederate Constitution of 1861. A utilitarian document devoid of positive principle, its only true declaration was that proponents of Slavery must have the "freedom" to implant it wherever they choose.
That sentiment was expressed in more flowery and poisonous language by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, in the infamous "Cornerstone of the Confederacy Speech" he gave in Savannah, Georgia on March 25, 1861.
"The new constitution," he said, speaking of the Confederate proclamation, "has put to rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery, as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro (sic) in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."
Stephens went on to assert that the ideas of equality among human beings proclaimed in the U.S. Constitution were "fundamentally wrong … Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro (sic) is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition."
The sentiments that were the foundation of the Confederacy did not die with it, nor with the equally pernicious regime of legalized racism the White South erected in its place in the late 1800s.
Nor, despite the sea-change on race relations in our public and private sectors since the 1960s, have they been completely eradicated today.
The shocking recent burnings of three crosses in Durham, N.C., is just one of many examples one could cite as evidence that some still follow the evil principles of the Confederacy—and a reminder that there are no words which can exonerate its proponents or scrub the stain of evil from its primary symbol, the Confederate flag.
Enviroshop is maintained by dedicated NetSys Interactive Inc. owners & employees who generously contribute their time to maintenance & editing, web design, custom programming, & website hosting for Enviroshop.