The first was discarded because it looked too much like the American flag. It is also used by anti-government, white supremacist groups who embrace violence, she says. The flag no longer represented just a 19th-century battle to preserve white supremacy, but a 20th-century one as well. The Confederate flag represents pride in the face of poverty to Massey, who came to Mississippi in 2001, the same year voters decided against changing the state flag. The phrase "the thin blue line" is older, perhaps first popularized in 1922 by New York City police Commissioner Richard Enright, who used the phrase to describe police as . The flag's stubborn hold on the state isn't just the result of an ironclad compromise that makes it all but impossible to take down. Roofs crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbolthe Confederate flag. Thomasa Massey, 49, jumps out of her car at Pearl Park in a majority-white Jackson suburb wearing a T-shirt with Confederate butterflies she designed with Pride, Not Prejudice underneath. Mobs fighting to protect segregated schools wore Confederate flags in Little Rock and New Orleans and Austin and Birmingham. God's will be done. I am going to start researching this, she adds about the history as Kate calls for her. But I dont believe everyone who likes the flag is racist. The history teacher could handle it if the state flag changed, though. We try to help people.. t was 1957 when little Lindy Lubys great-uncle showed up at her house near Benton. I dont think the black people around here care, Lindy says. Slavery was an issue, but not the cause, the teacher tells me. Bryan Myers, the same author who brought you An Open Letter to the Political Leadership of America, a hard-hitting evisceration of the fecklessness of our political leaders that went viral in recent weeks, now tells us what should be done about it. The phrase the thin blue line is older, perhaps first popularized in 1922 by New York City police Commissioner Richard Enright, who used the phrase to describe police as that intensive battle line, the first line of defense against criminality., By the 1980s, the phrase had gone fully mainstream, propped up by a symbiotic relationship between increasingly powerful urban police departments and sympathetic media; in Errol Morris 1988 film of the same name, a judge told the camera that police were the thin blue line that separates the public from anarchy.. Removing it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the legislature. Heres the data on Minneapolis police use of force per week since 2017. Hentz, 41, is from Missouri, once a violent slave state, but calls the flag just an inanimate object, adding: Stop letting it control you.. The "heritage, not hate" argument is predicated on this national amnesia. To this point, theDemocratic Party and the political and news media classin general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response. McCluney teaches his black students his Confederate history. The Ku Klux Klan flew it at lynching parties and angry mobs waved it outside public schools as black children enrolled; in front of white segregation academies and next to leering dogs unleashed on black protesters wanting the right to vote. When Southern states gave the flags pride of place in their capitols, it was to signal support for segregation. The infamous tree, used for lynching, was bending over a bridge on Highway 433 toward Lexington. Cowardice, too, is heritage. Violence transcends the quirks of philosophy, religion, technology and culture, s time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. I go to see and share the bitter end , I have ever held the South were right. It's how Mississippi and Florida could include the Confederate flag in their state flags during the 1890s with little fuss. I love peace more than life. The Confederate flag controversy: What does the flag mean today? After I mention that Mississippi outlawed freeing slaves in 1857, he said that the south wouldnt have seceded if the federal government had allowed (white, male) voters to decide slavery per state or territory. "In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect, and in many ways, revere it.". The SCV might fly the flag, but we dont associate with them. The Confederate flag was adopted to represent a short-lived rebellion to extend and protect white supremacy and black slavery. The south was demanding a federal slavery code to force all states to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and return runaways to owners, even as northern states were passing personal liberty laws to circumvent what abolitionists called the bloodhound law. As Hong Kong police denied the protesters a permit to march, they attacked the crowd despite its peaceful nature, using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse them. After the north won, it imposed a harsh Reconstruction on the south that still fuels white resentment today. Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. I would not be up around the last flag making a chain gang to keep somebody from taking it down, Davis says. Kek Flags Supporters of President Trump storm the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington DC. Pipes fill a glass case, and we avoid the curtained adult room. Something went wrong. My family, we were poor. We just didnt believe in racism. It turned into one big heckuva mess. A New Jersey man bought a Confederate flag to oppose the Truman administration in 1951. Abandon this charlatanism. After she sat on a jury that condemned a man to death, she now campaigns for alternatives to execution and stars in a new documentary about her experience. There are trashy white people and trashy black people., SCV is not racist or violent, he says. Even as the institution had shrunk outside the south for a century, its riches continued to drive the US economy, including Wall Street and early capitalism, up to the 1860s. 0:57. Retired military, Barnes used to attend all the Ole Miss college football games, but he now watches on TV. The war became a national tragedy, not a just cause. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. I have struggled. I later relay Lindys questions to Genesis Be, a 31-year-old hip-hop artist, public speaker and anti-Confederate flag activist from Biloxi. The current cycle of protests is a grotesque and familiar protocol, shaped over the past years since the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Here is what I had to say about ISIS back in July 2014: Id bring fear and death to them all! To me, the flag is not a racist thing. Until that kid went in that church in Charleston, people never thought anything about the Confederate or Mississippi flag, she says. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolinas attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in. Rather than thinking that they ought to be chastened by being caught on tape beating, tear-gassing, and pepper-spraying protesters, perhaps doing all this in full view of the public is the point, Wyman wrote in a column addressing the war scenes in American streets surrounding the initial wave of Floyd protests. Its chemical weapons are banned from theaters of war but available for promiscuous use among the populace. This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. In our world there lives a relativity small group of guardians who not only stand ready to do violence on the behalf of others, but actually wait anxiously for the opportunity. Reader support helps us keep our explainers free for all. Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender. She immediately brings up Roof. Its a piece of our heritage that should be left there to honor sacrifices, Davis says in a cozy parlor, adding that most soldiers were dirt-poor farmers with no slaves. Add to cart Add to WatchlistUnwatch Watch list is full Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, says he wishes poor whites would recognize how powerful politicians have long played racial politics with Confederate emblems a deliberate strategy to divide them from people with shared economic interests. White folks can be that, too. The law requires the flag to be hoisted 30 feet from the ground, illuminated at night, and surrounded by "an appropriate decorative iron fence." That was horrific to my organization (SCV) when that took place.. If we cant get white people to stand together, its going to be another civil war, he adds. A little more than a week before the jury delivered its verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, and about 10 miles from the Hennepin County Government Center where Chauvin sat on trial, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was fatally shot by an officer during a traffic stop. Its hoisting marked the end of a night of violently suppressed protests of the killing of the 20-year-old, a young Black father who had been pulled over, his mother said, because police had seen air fresheners dangling from his rearview mirror and had been shot in the chest by veteran Officer Kim Potter, former president of the citys police union. God judge me, not man. The flag that Dylann Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, endorses the violence he committed. A photo soon emerged of him holding a Confederate flag. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. newsletter. Learn more. He accurately interpreted the cause of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, men who were too weak to truthfully address that causes natural end. To wait longer would be a crime. The flag even became popular in the North: a man purchasing the flag in New Jersey told Life he was doing it to oppose Truman. It was there when our grandfathers, great-grandfathers, were struggling to feed their six, eight, 10 kids. His father sent a note back with no groceries. Move forward. You wont find it at Wal*Mart, a large sign proclaims, reminding shoppers that the retailer dropped Confederate merchandise within a week of Roofs massacre. She supports Mississippians right to keep it as is. Massey, who identifies as more Blackfoot-Cherokee than white, isnt interested in military history, saying the flag celebrates her heritage as a southerner, period. SCV was created in 1896 for the vindication of the cause for which we fought and to ensure that a true history of the 1861-1865 period is preserved. SCV members worked with the United Confederate Veterans and other groups in the early 20th century to demand school textbooks supporting the revisionist view that the south fought for a just lost cause that was decidedly not slavery. Its a symbol of our state; its who we are., She continues: Northern people were down here trying to burn all our stuff true; the Yankees torched Jackson three times and we were trying to stop them They didnt think it was right we had slaves. White mobs at the University of Alabama carried Confederate flags when they threw rocks at Autherine Lucy, the university's first black student, before the university decided to expel her rather than protect her. As the country prepared to hear the verdict in the Chauvin trial, more police armies massed in American cities. They operate as islands, their derision for the populace they purportedly protect on full display. Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body but not before spreading the disease to many other people. itol began flying the flag in 1962 and never stopped. "The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag, Haley said. As recently as 2011, Haley dismissed concerns about the flag, saying she thought the state had moved on. When crafting the compromise which made the flag more visible to visitors than it had been before legislators did their utmost to ensure the flag couldn't be pushed out any further. Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body but not before spreading the disease to many other people. As historian John Coski writes in, Southerners weren't shy about enlisting the design in the cause of white supremacy. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longerAmerica and thatthey no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. Enjoy.. A photo of the man wearing the sweatshirt was just one of the images of hateful symbols that have circulated from the mob, whose violence led to four deaths and wreaked havoc on Congress. Sign up to receive email updates daily and to hear what's going on with us! I have lived among it most of my life, and have seen less harsh treatment from master to man than I have beheld in the North from father to son. because for those who embrace violence, the ones who chose to embrace evil share the same blood. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. Were right was it nearly forgotten, their derision for the white, not hate '' is. Trashy black people., SCV is not a racist thing on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington DC his! 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