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Subject: Georgia Colors Have Some Seeing Red; Defenders Say State Flag Stands for More
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 04:36:11 EST
Message-ID: <32.1992Nov17.043611@AmeriCast.com>

Georgia Colors Have Some Seeing Red; Defenders Say State Flag
Stands for More Than Just Whistling 'Dixie'<By William
Booth<Washington Post Staff Writer= ATLANTA - Dressed in natty
gray pinstripes, the Sons of Confederate Veterans say they are
not a bunch of crypto-rednecks hellbent on glorifying slavery and
racist violence.

But here they are, parading down Peachtree Street on Veterans
Day, waving the most controversial symbol in Georgia, the state
flag.  The flag was altered in 1956 to incorporate the battle em-
blem of the Confederate States of America, a symbol that many
people in Georgia and the South find haunting and repugnant. They
want it changed.

So does Georgia Gov. Zell Miller (D), an ambitious politician who
took the unusual step of asking a conservative state Legislature
to restore the flag to its pre-1956 design, which bore red-and-
white stripes but no emblem.

While the flag fight rages in Georgia, activists in Mississippi,
Alabama and South Carolina also are seeking to banish their
state's ways of displaying the Confederate flag.  And so it be-
gins again - the seemingly endless contest in the South about the
meaning of the Confederacy and its legacy in modern times. Among
the combatants, there is the feeling that this fight is not so
much about a flag but about the soul of the place.

"People tend to think of this as a recent story," said Edward
Ayers, a historian at the University of Virginia. "But this
didn't start at the beginning of the civil rights movement. This
started at the end of the Civil War."

Yet the debate has been newly invigorated because the 1996 Summer
Olympic Games are coming to Atlanta. Unless the flag is changed,
many city boosters say, the outside world may well see Atlanta,
which aspires to be known as "The City Too Busy To Hate," as an
anachronistic backwater populated by racist Johnny Rebs.

"The Confederacy is nothing to be venerated," said Daniel Levi-
tas, executive director of the Center for Democratic Renewal
here, one of about 30 groups advocating a change in the flag,
which he compared to "the moral equivalent of the swastika."

Earl Shinhoster, Southeast regional director of the National As-
sociation for the Advancement of Colored People, said, "There are
those who maintain there are more important issues to deal with,
that symbols are not so important. But I think flags are very
powerful symbols, and we can't ignore the real effect they have
on people. A flag ought to be representative of all the people."
The flag flap is filling newspapers here with poll results and
letters, as one side links the Confederacy to genocide and the
other complains that its southern heritage is being eroded by
overly sensitive blacks and liberals, who see nothing good or no-
ble about the Confederacy, just slavery, violence, fear and
blood.

Charles Lunsford, who supervises the governor's office of consu-
mer affairs and is a leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans,
said he does not believe that the Confederacy was the moral
equivalent of Nazi Germany nor that it stands for segregated
academies and Ku Klux Klansmen in white sheets.

To him and other sons and daughters of the South, the Confederate
flag symbolizes not southern atrocities but southern pride -
honor and duty, courage in the face of adversity, states' rights
and not a little bit of ancestor worship.

"People just need to leave each other's heroes alone," said Luns-
ford, who feels that, one by one, all the symbols of the Con-
federacy, from whistling "Dixie" to street signs honoring its
soldiers, have been taken away or co-opted by "hate groups."
Those, he said, include the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP.

"We're being treated like lepers in our own country," said Lee
Collins of the Georgia Committee to Save the State Flag. "We're
still living in a reconstructionist state."

Collins said two Georgias exist, one inside metropolitan
Atlanta's beltway and the "real" Georgia outside. Inside, he
said, are newcomers and Confederate know-nothings, people who
think Atlanta is Sun Belt, not South.

"People complain that the Confederate flag reminds them of old
South," Collins said. "But so does fried chicken, and you don't
see anybody attacking fried chicken."

As for the argument that seeing the Confederate flag will perturb
Olympic visitors, Collins said: "That's what they come to Atlanta
for - the old South, "Tara" and "Gone With the Wind" and the Con-
federacy. That's what the people from Belgium want to see."

To which Levitas, the anti-flagger, responded: "That might be
what the people from Belgium want to see, but what about the peo-
ple from Africa?"

While many business and civic organizations have rallied behind
the governor's attempt to change the flag, emotions run high.

A call-in survey by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the
flag furor brought a record number of responses, more than the
number when the newspaper asked readers what they thought of ac-
tress Demi Moore appearing nude and very pregnant on the cover of
Vanity Fair magazine. About 75 percent of callers said leave the
flag alone.  A more recent, more scientific poll by the paper
found that 67 percent like the flag as is. Of those beyond the
Atlanta beltway, 70 percent said hands off. Perhaps surprisingly,
about 36 percent of blacks also like the flag.  "It is obvious
that more understanding is needed on this issue," Gov. Miller
told the paper.

Miller said he believes that the Legislature ultimately will
change the flag, but a measure to do so has been stalled in com-
mittee since 1987.

Although some historians have concluded that Georgia's flag was
changed in 1956 by a defiant Legislature protesting court orders
to desegerate, Lunsford said the alteration was made to com-
memorate the upcoming Civil War centennial.

John Sammons Bell, who redesigned the flag in 1956, still main-
tains that the flag was changed to honor the Confederacy, not to
protest desegregation.

Whatever the reason, inclusion of the battle flag, the most iden-
tifiable symbol of the Confederacy, can deeply disturb many black
southerners.

"I truly believe that most white folks flying the flag do so to
honor the Confederacy," said John Shelton Reed, head of the In-
stitute for Research and Social Science at the University of
North Carolina. "They do it as a symbol of pride, not white
supremacy. But they have to understand that is how many people
perceive it. That's reason enough to take the battle flag off the
state flag."

Historian Ayers said there are "other ways to express affection
for the South," saying he believes that many southerners want to
forget that the Civil War was not only about nobility, courage,
honor and states' rights but also slavery.

"The cost of keeping the current flag seems just too high," Ayers
said. "It just doesn't seem worth it."<02:26 11-17C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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