As the nation’s leaders ponder the fate of the Confederate battle flag – and, in some cases, removing it from government buildings – I am reminded of my time as a reporter and editor in Montgomery, Alabama during the 1980s and ‘90s.
In February 1988 I team-covered a story when then state Rep. Thomas Reed and 13 others were arrested in an attempt to scramble to the crest of the state capitol and remove the Confederate battle flag from atop the dome. They never got over an 8-foot construction fence before they were arrested and taken to jail. Flag supporters celebrated and vowed the flag would never come down.
As a reporter for The Montgomery Advertiser I witnessed the orchestrated event and even interviewed a leader of the Ku Klux Klan for my story.
While protestors said they saw the rebel flag as a symbol of slavery and black oppression, supporters of the flag said it represented their Southern heritage.
At the time, Reed was president of the Alabama NAACP. In 1970 he was among the first blacks elected to the Alabama state legislature since Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South. At the time of the confrontation over the flag, the NAACP was working to remove the Confederate flag from over the South Carolina Statehouse, and to remove rebel flags from the designs of the Georgia and Mississippi state flags.
Prior to the arrests, Reed had attempted to negotiate the removal of the flag with then Gov. Guy Hunt. Hunt, the first Republican governor in Alabama since Reconstruction, said the flag was viewed by many as historic and without racial connotation. He thought it was up to the state legislature to decide the fate of the flag.
Reed and other protesters were charged with second-degree criminal trespassing and each was released on $300 bond, while facing penalties of $500 fines and three months in jail.
Later that same year, Reed would face even harsher legal penalties when he was convicted on federal charges of bribery and sentenced to four years in prison. Prosecutors said he took $10,000 from a Georgia businessman to influence the early release of a relative of the businessman from prison for murder. Reed denied any wrongdoing and maintained the extortion prosecution was due to his attempt to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol.
More than 27 years later, on June 24, 2015, Reed’s dream came to pass. With controversy swirling over the Confederate flag in Charleston, South Carolina, on the orders of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Confederate battle flags were unceremoniously removed from several state sites around the capital, according to reporter Charles J. Dean.
I am reminded about what flag supporters refer to as the historical links the flag has to the South. For them it may represent a symbol of resistance and independence, traits that our founding fathers had at the birth of this great nation. However, I also hear my father’s voice in my head when he explained the Confederate flag as a symbol of high treason, when the South attempted to secede from the union in a fight to keep African Americans as subhuman and in slavery.
As a veteran of World War II, my father fought for a nation that still treated him like dirt. Born in Mississippi in 1926, he was raised on the disparity of race and hate dished out by Southern whites and, as a soldier in the U.S. Army, by Northern whites as well. Fighting in both Europe and the Pacific, he guarded both German and Japanese prisoners of war and witnessed the treatment of German prisoners who had more rights than the black soldiers who guarded them.
He compared the Confederate flag to the symbols of Nazi Germany and its white supremacist ethos and suggested that the symbols of the Confederacy should be banned in the new South just as the symbols of Nazi Germany are banned in today’s reinvented, progressive Germany.
In this United States of America, I have no problem keeping symbols of the Confederacy in museums and in history books. But to flaunt them in a world trying to rid itself of racism and bigotry does not help build a stronger union.
I was born “Down South” in Mississippi and raised “Up South” in St. Louis (a former slave state), and lived in Alabama and Florida between 1987 and 1992. Having traveled in more than 30 states I have seen Confederate flags throughout America and every time I see them I think, “There they go, still fighting the Civil War.”
You might think of Confederate flags as historical symbols. To me, they are historical symbols of people who sacrificed nearly 700,000 American lives in a war to preserve slavery, and it is not something I think progressive Americans should celebrate. The Civil War was divisive and the Confederate flag was, and is, a symbol of that division.
It’s time for the South and all who ally themselves with a Southern, pre-Civil War mentality to stop fighting the Civil War. Thank God, you lost – and for good reason.
Ishmael-Lateef Ahmad is a freelance journalist based in Missouri and founder of ISHWORLD: The International Search for Humanity peace project.
