By Peter Galuszka
The Confederate Battle flag is quickly unraveling throughout the Old Dominion. With it are going many icons of an era racked with controversy and hatred, along with mythology, which regretfully will still continue in some form.
Following the example of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who asked that state’s legislature to take the Confederate flag off State Capitol grounds, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe ordered the Department of Motor Vehicles to stop issuing specialty license plates showing the flag along with the Sons of Confederate Veterans logo.
National retailers such as Walmart and Amazon likewise nixed the flag and removed items displaying it from their shelves and warehouses.
Two events helped push this national movement with remarkable speed.
One was a U.S. Supreme Court decision – split evenly between liberal and conservative judges – that Texas had the right not to allow the Confederate flag on its license plates. The other was the shooting death of nine African-Americans by a self-styled white supremacist as they prayed at a Charleston church.
It’s about time some movement was made on this matter. But in Virginia, as in other parts of the South, there’s a lot more to do. Richmond’s famous Monument Avenue has the statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. Why aren’t they dismantled?
Richmond area schools have “Rebels “or “Confederates” as their mascots, namely Lee-Davis High School in Mechanicsville and Douglas S. Freeman in Henrico County.
Throughout the state are street names celebrating the Southern war machine. There are Jefferson Davis Highways in Alexandria and South Richmond. Only recently were flags removed from the Confederate Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and at private Washington & Lee University.
Of course, the flag is an insult to those oppressed by it, notably African-Americans. But mythology – about an honorable South tragically plundered and lost – has provided cover and let it fly 150 years after the Civil War.
Having grown up mostly in the South or Border States in the 1950s and 1960s and then having worked there for years, I have dealt with the Confederate flag for years. I don’t find it absolutely shocking as some do, but I have always wondered why it keeps flying on public property.
It wasn’t until I was in college in the Boston area when I started really asking myself questions. For one course, I read “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” historian C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 masterpiece. He demolished the idea that legal segregation was a long-time Southern tradition. Instead, it started up in the 1890s, he pointed out.
That’s not a very long time, especially for white Southerners who purport to be so sensitive to history. Instead, they have invented a mythology. Virginia is becoming more diverse and includes people who have no family tie to state during the mid-19th century. One reason Gov. Haley had the fortitude to do what she did was that she is an Indian-American, born in South Carolina. In other words, she is neither white nor black according to the old rules and didn’t need to be guided by them.
My immediate concern is that this long-needed purge won’t go far enough. And as long as the generals preside over Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the fairy tales will endure.
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