In 2004, Southern Illinois UniversitynCarbondale Press published Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War. Editor Gregory J.W. Urwin and 11 writers detailed the violent murders inflicted by Confederate soldiers upon captured, wounded and unarmed black soldiers while fighting under the Confederate flag.
An October 1864 federal attack on Saltville, Va., included black soldiers from the 5th U.S. Colored Calvary. The Union soldiers were not successful and pulled from the battlefield as the sun set. The following morning, Confederate troops advanced over the battleground, seeking out and killing the wounded black soldiers.
Following the deadly Battle of the Crater in Southern, Va., Confederate soldiers, shot, bayoneted and bludgeoned captured and wounded soldiers. One rebel soldier wrote that his brigade “littered the trench with murdered blacks.”
This is part of the glorious legacy that Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt officially legitimized when he allowed the Confederate flag to be flown during a celebration of Confederate soldiers.
As Americans continue to die in an avowed war for freedom, the state of Missouri celebrates the honor of a force that not only enslaved Americans, but also literally tried to destroy the United States of America.
The Confederate flag is more than cloth that flaps in the wind to African Americans. It is used widely by hate groups as a white supremacist symbol and therefore causes injury to us. It evokes some of the same anger and terror in us that the Nazi swastika inspires in Jewish Americans.
To honor the Confederate flag is to honor a symbol of inhuman slavery, oppression, racist hate and disloyalty to America.
For some Confederate followers to suggest that it is acceptable to fly a Confederate flag because African Americans “have their own celebrations” is dangerously naïve and should be repulsive to any decent-thinking citizen of this nation.
What is truly sad about Blunt’s decision is that he would not purport to support any entity that sought to harm or destroy America, now or in the past. He is more concerned about winning the votes of avowed racists than he is with insulting black Missourians, 80 percent of which voted against him in last November’s election.
Blunt has given the black community several slaps across the face since taking office, but his decision to embrace symbolically the Confederate flag is among his worst acts during his short tenure as governor.
A friend of the Confederacy is no friend of black people, and Blunt has made it clear that he has little regard for better understanding, friendship, respect or support from the African-American community in this state.