Minding the South

John Shelton Reed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351505239
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

For over three decades John Shelton Reed has been "minding" the South. He is the author or editor of thirteen books about the region. Despite his disclaimer concerning the formal study of Southern history, Reed has read widely and in depth about the South. His primary focus is upon Southerners' present-day culture, but he knows that one must approach the South historically in order to understand the place and its people.

Why is the South so different from the rest of America? Rupert Vance, Reed's predecessor in sociology at Chapel Hill, once observed that the existence of the South is a triumph of history over geography and economics. The South has resisted being assimilated by the larger United States and has kept a personality that is distinctly its own. That is why Reed celebrates the South.

The chapters in this book cover everything from great thinkers about the South—Eugene D. Genovese, C. Vann Woodward, M. E. Bradford—to the uniqueness of a region that was once a hotbed of racism, but has recently attracted hundreds of thousands of black people transplanted from the North. There are also chapters about Southerners who have devoted their talents to politics, soft drinks, rock and roll, and jewelry design. Reed writes with wit and Southern charm, never afraid to speak his mind, even when it comes to taking his beloved South to task. While readers may not share all his opinions, most will agree that John Shelton Reed is one of the best "South watchers" there is.

VIII

Reflections

The Banner That Won’t Stay Furled

This essay began its life as an Olin Lecture at the University of London’s Institute of United States Studies in 2001, when the Mississippi state flag controversy was in the news. I guessed that the British would be as baffled as most non-Southern Americans, so I tried to explain it.

Furl that Banner, for ’tis weary;
Round its staff ’tis drooping dreary;
Furl it, fold it, it is best;
For there’s not a man to wave it,
And there’s not a sword to save it,
And there’s not one left to lave it
In the blood which heroes gave it;
And its foes now scorn and brave it;
Furl it, hide it—let it rest.

— Father Abram Joseph Ryan, “The Conquered Banner”

In April 2001, 750,000 Mississippians went to the polls to decide whether to change their state flag. The old flag, adopted in 1894, prominently incorporates the Confederate battle flag, and a committee set up by the governor had proposed to replace it with a pattern of twenty stars on a blue field. The stars were apparently to represent the thirteen original colonies, the six nations and Indian tribes associated with the state, and the state of Mississippi itself, although it was also said that they represent Mississippi’s status as the twentieth state. The important point was that they were not the Confederate flag.

The summer before in South Carolina, where the battle flag had flown for nearly a half-century over the statehouse, legislators from both parties, black and white, faced with an economic boycott of the state by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, agreed to move the flag to a new location next to a Confederate memorial on the statehouse grounds. Nobody was really happy with that arrangement, but most parties to the dispute seemed to take some satisfaction from the fact that their opponents were unhappy, too.

And in January 2001, after a running battle that had begun well before the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, the Georgia legislature voted to remove the Confederate emblem from its prominent place on the Georgia state flag, adopting a new, compromise flag that includes the former flag in a sort of catalog of historic flags. It looks like—well, it looks like a flag designed by a committee, and cartoonists have had fun with it. But it, too, seems to have done the job of imposing a sort of grumpy stalemate.

These three events were only the latest in a string of conflicts over Confederate symbols. Beginning seriously in the early 1990s, we have seen controversy over high school and university emblems, names, and mascots; police and National Guard and Boy Scout and Little League baseball insignia; flags flown by parks, cemeteries, historical sites, businesses, hotels, and college fraternities; seals of towns and organizations; customized automobile license plates; Confederate holidays and monuments; junior-high-school dress codes, workers’ lunch-boxes, and no doubt other things I have missed. Up to a point, the Mississippi conflict was virtually a replay of the South Carolina and Georgia disputes, and— except for its statewide scale and the national attention it received—a replay of most of the others as well. The players, the line-up, the arguments pro and con tend to be pretty much the same, again and again.

The new flag was endorsed by nearly every Mississippian that anyone ever heard of: the present governor and five other officials elected statewide; the former governor who headed the panel that proposed the new flag; the state conference of the NAACP; the bishops of the Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Methodist churches, leaders of the Presbyterian church, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon, a nationally influential leader of the Christian Right; the Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Mississippi’s major newspaper), all the other daily papers in the state that I was able to track down, the student newspaper at the University of Mississippi, and the Mississippi Business Journal; the Mississippi Tourism Association, the Mississippi Economic Council, and the Chambers of Commerce in most of the state’s major towns; the Mississippi Manufacturers Association and other trade and professional associations; the management of the Grand Casino in Gulfport; the city council of Jackson (the capital); the presidents of the eight state universities, the faculty senate at Mississippi State, eighty-seven historians from colleges in the state, thirteen head coaches in football, basketball, and baseball at the four largest universities; Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers and former national chairman of the NAACP; actors Morgan Freeman and Gerald McRaney; authors Ellen Douglas, Barry Hannah, and John Grisham; Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape; football hero Archie Manning; and Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959. (Anyone who knows Mississippi will recognize the significance of those last two names.)

This was a truly remarkable coalition of historic adversaries: civil rights activists and country-club Republicans, student newspapers and university presidents, casino managers and fundamentalist ministers, trial lawyers and industrialists, college professors and football coaches. According to a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran who wrote the Clarion-Ledger, even Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson would have supported changing the flag, and at a conference on Christian unity one minister asked the question “What Would Jesus Do?” about it.

On the other side a ragtag assortment of old-flag loyalists also made up an uneasy, if not so unlikely, alliance. The most vocal were “heritage” organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), an ostensibly nonpolitical group who nevertheless ran spot television ads in several markets around the state, defending the flag—and, by implication, the honor—of their ancestors. Sharing their views was the only supporter of the old flag widely known outside Mississippi, the novelist and historian Shelby Foote.

Although Foote and many other defenders of the Confederate heritage took pains to distance themselves from white supremacists, they found themselves allied, willy-nilly, with folks like a white “Nationalist” named Richard Barrett, who argued that “Negroes, communists and Japanese” are trying to take over Mississippi and “the Confederate flag is there to signify defiance of oppression.” (Barrett also claimed that the new flag was modeled after that of Communist China, although the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an old-time civil rights organization, protested, more plausibly, that the new flag resembled the first national flag of the Confederacy.)

The proponents of the new flag plainly won the endorsement battle. They also spent more money—$700,000, nearly a dollar per voter— much of it on a sophisticated phone bank and direct-mail campaign. Their opponents reported expenditures of less than $20,000, or about 2.5 cents per voter, some of which apparently went to buy old-flag Mardi Gras beads for the Catholic Gulf Coast.

As I said, pretty much the same story could be written about the earlier controversies in South Carolina and Georgia, which also saw a broad coalition in favor of change, collectively well-heeled, well-connected, and seemingly unstoppable. And in South Carolina and Georgia, they were unstoppable. They didn’t get everything they wanted, but they got the flag off the South Carolina statehouse dome, and they got it relegated to obscurity on the new Georgia flag.

But in Mississippi the outcome was different. The pro-change forces’ campaign seems to have turned out a substantially higher percentage of those who agreed with them. But the polls suggest that there simply weren’t many such people in the first place, and the campaign did not change many minds. By a margin of 65 percent to 35 percent Mississippians voted against the change. Mississippi will remain for now the only state with the Confederate battle standard as a legible component of its flag.

This raises a couple of interesting questions. First of all, what is it with Mississippi? Why was the outcome there different from those in Georgia and South Carolina?

That one is easy. The outcome was different because the question was put to a popular vote. In Mississippi the forces for change were strong enough to get the question of the flag on the table (as they could not have done even a decade ago), but they were not strong enough just to tell legislators to fix it. In the other states, more urban and economically developed, legislators were persuaded to work out compromises that surveys showed would almost certainly not have won a majority in a referendum. Maybe legislators are more far-sighted than ordinary citizens; certainly they are more responsive to organized interest-group pressure. You can argue either that Georgia and South Carolina legislators betrayed their constituents or that they showed the sort of leadership that is all too rare in democratic polities—or quite possibly both.

Another, harder, question is why so many Southerners are attached to the Confederate flag. Again, let’s take Mississippi as an example and look at why the numbers worked out the way they did.

Since whites outnumber blacks by about the same ratio as anti-change voters outnumbered pro-change ones—that is, by about two to one—it is tempting just to conclude that whites want to keep the old flag and blacks do not, and certainly that’s a large part of the story. A Clarion-Ledger showed that something like 80 percent of whites who had an opinion were in favor of the old flag and almost as high a percentage of blacks were against it. But that just raises another question. Why did an overwhelming majority of white Mississippians and a significant minority of black ones want to keep the Confederate emblem on their state flag? What does that flag mean to Southerners?

It is hard to talk about this without sounding like some sort of postmodernist twit, but we need to recognize that there is no intrinsic meaning to colors on a cloth. A flag is a “text” to which different “interpretive communities” bring their own meanings. Some of these communities insist on the unique validity of their own understandings and seem incapable of recognizing other points of view. Some folks, in other words, are simply talking past each other. Others, however, understand each other all too well. Let’s try to sort this out.

* * *

The proponents of change were often eloquent about what the old flag meant to them. Most African Americans and some white liberals agreed with the black minister from Raymond, Mississippi, who told an AP reporter that the Confederate flag evokes “bad memories” of its use by opponents of the civil rights movement. (It is significant—I will come back to this—that most objections at the popular level were to how the flag was deployed in the 1960s rather than the 1860s.) A Jackson grocery store owner told the New York Times, “I was a freedom rider. The other side would hold the rebel flag. It was always a sign of segregation and hatred.” The mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi, agreed: “When I think about the flag I think about the Ku Klux Klan and when they came along here burning crosses in my yard—they had that flag.”

Look at the old films of George Wallace rallies. There is the governor of Alabama standing tall (as tall as he could) for segregation, and those who stood with him waved the flag as they did it. Wallace’s pledges to “Keep Alabama Southern” and then to “Southernize America” had an unabashed racial component: He and his supporters identified the “Southern way of life” with white supremacy and were not the least bit hesitant to say so. The days when overwhelming majorities of white Southerners felt that way are gone, but it is simply ahistorical to deny that the flag’s principal use in the 1960s was as a segregationist symbol—and black Southerners have not forgotten that.

No wonder that, as black columnist Donna Britt put it, “For many African Americans just seeing the battle flag—on a T-shirt or a coffee mug—is a stab to the heart.” Kweisi Mfume, president of the national NAACP, said the old Mississippi flag “celebrate[s] the twisted philosophy of bigotry and hatred in this country.” And the NAACP’s state president interpreted the vote to retain it as a sign that “Mississippi wants to remain in the eyes of the world a racist state.”

Even many black Mississippians who took a more sympathetic view of their white neighbors’ attitudes felt, understandably, that the battle flag is a symbol of the white South, a symbol that excludes them and denies them respect. As Harrison County Supervisor William Martin told the AP, “I want to be counted. I’m a citizen in this state. I want a flag that represents me, too.”

Some white Mississippians agreed that the state flag should not be divisive and recognized that the existing one inevitably is. This was the line taken by the religious leaders and most of the academics who spoke out on the matter. One letter-writer in the Clarion-Ledger asked his fellow white Mississippians to “consider the fact that our present flag is offensive to a large percent of our population” and implored them, “in a spirit of good will, [to] take a positive step, make the change and show the people it offends we care and are willing to do something about it.” Others put it as just a matter of good manners. One white man argued at a public meeting in Jackson that “a state flag should not cause pain to its own people,” and the author John Grisham made the same case, arguing that the flag should be changed to “something not offensive to 35 percent of our population.”

Many white Mississippians who made this argument made it clear that they didn’t see the flag as racist, and regretted that others did. Author Barry Hannah, for example, said that he never saw the battle flag “as the flag of hostility and hate” and that he “still feel[s] reverence to the troops who fought the war.” He said it is “a damn crying shame we can’t celebrate them because of the Klan and idiots that began grabbing the flag,” but “if [the new flag]’s what times call for, so be it.” And Mary Ann Mobley, the former Miss America, said simply, “I’ve never thought of that flag as racist, but I’m also not African American.”

The most common argument against the old flag, however, at least in the published record, was that it was bad for Mississippi’s public relations and ultimately for tourism and industrial recruitment. (The fact that the campaign for change was largely funded by business interests may have something to do with that.) A spokesman for the Mississippi Economic Council (the state Chamber of Commerce) said that organization’s support for changing the flag was “a strategic business decision,” adding that “it can help create a more positive business climate for our state.” The president of the Mississippi Tourism Association concurred: Changing the flag “will enhance our state’s economic development efforts,” he said. And the Mississippi Business Journal ran an editorial headlined simply: Bad for Business.

The largest donor to the campaign for change was Jim Barksdale, a Jackson native and internet millionaire who made it clear that he is kin to Mississippi’s best-known Confederate general. Barksdale gave $185,000 to the Mississippi Legacy Fund, the major pro-change PAC, remarking that the old flag “doesn’t send a positive signal outside the state.” (It did not escape notice that he made this observation from his home in California.) Barksdale argued that the flag “prompts some businesses to steer clear of Mississippi,” and his money went to pay for fliers stating that “The current flag is . . . discouraging companies from bringing good paying jobs to our people” and radio spots in which a man’s voice said “Changing Mississippi’s flag tells companies that we’re ready to work.”

In retrospect, it might have been better to emphasize the argument from good manners, or from Christian charity, rather than the pocketbook case for change, which put a new spin on Jefferson’s remark that “merchants have no country” (or, as Pat Buchanan put it, “Money has no flag”). Shelby Foote dismissed the economic argument with aristocratic contempt. “I think the people who want a new flag are worried about tourists,” he said. “I never cared much for tourists myself.” A few defenders of the old flag pointed out the absence of any actual evidence for the proposition that it discouraged outside investment in the state. “Industry’s going to come here because of the deal they get, not because of the flag,” one said. Another even wrote the Clarion-Ledger to point out—and regret—that the flag had not kept the national Gannett newspaper chain from buying the Clarion-Ledger. And a Vicksburg woman told pollsters, “I don’t see that many companies looking to come to Mississippi anyway.”

My guess is that most non-Southerners at least understand the arguments for changing the flag, but what could the other two-thirds of Mississippi voters have been thinking? Why did they turn out in such numbers to crush the proposal for change? And I don’t want to pick on Mississippi: Why would so many Georgians and South Carolinians and other Southerners have done the same, given the chance?

Some—a dwindling, if not insignificant number—like the flag for the same reason the NAACP despises it: because they see it as a symbol of white supremacy. There is a strange sort of agreement here. In fact, a couple of years ago, a black man suing to change the Georgia state flag called the leader of the Southern White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a friendly witness to testify that the battle flag does indeed stand for “segregation, white supremacy and states’ rights.”

I don’t want to belabor this point, but when skinheads turned out to decorate Confederate graves with battle flags (as they did not long ago in Alabama), when Byron de la Beckwith wore a flag pin in his label at his trial for the murder of Medgar Evers, when a householder in my town flies the flag on Martin Luther King’s birthday—well, there is no question that they mean by the flag the same thing that the opponents of the civil rights movement meant by it forty years ago, and that message is understood by their adversaries, as it is meant to be.

Such outspoken white racists were, in fact, rarely heard from in the referendum debate, but even if such folks are now relegated to the lunatic fringe, they are still there, and they have websites, where they made their views known. And you can make what you will of the fact that some of the old flag’s supporters had ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the old, segregationist White Citizens Council. The upshot is that when defenders of the old flag argued that the Confederate flag is not a racist symbol, their argument was less effectively refuted by their adversaries than by some of their allies, like the woman who told a meeting at Millsaps College that blacks should be grateful for slavery because they are better off in America than in Africa.

My guess is that overtly racist support cost the old flag votes, on balance. It is clearly no longer quite respectable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• The Three Souths
• I. The Journalistic Eye
• II. History And Historians
• III. Friends And Masters
• IV. What They Say About Dixie
• V. Six Southerners
• VI. Southern Culture, High and Low
• VII. Southern Lit (and One Movie)
• VIII. Reflections
• IX. But Let’s Talk About Me
• Sources