Why the Confederate Battle Flag has Over

Why the Confederate Battle Flag Has Overstayed its Welcome

Dragged through the mud of the 19th century, General Lee’s once respected flag is no longer a suitable symbol for the modern day American South

Noah Humberston

On the night of September 22nd, 2015, Mitchell Hall was the backdrop to three nooses, a powerful symbol of hate and fear at the heart of a community over twenty thousand students call home. The University of Delaware police immediately removed the dangling ropes from the trees in front of Mitchell Hall and began to investigate the scene as a hate crime. No one was hurt, nothing was stolen, but yet the university’s acting president Nancy Targett called for the entire community’s cooperation in finding and holding the perpetrator accountable. While the police later decided the ropes were actually remnants of lantern decorations, in contradiction to their preliminary report, news that the ropes were nooses had already engulfed the campus and many students are still suspicious of the ropes true source.

Just one day earlier, the same ground was the scene of a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest involving hundreds of supporters. The knotted ropes obscured the front of the same building Bryan Stevenson, a renown black lawyer dedicated to justice for black communities in the deep south, was scheduled to speak at only two weeks later. The very courtrooms Stevenson fought for the racially fair process of justice in began hanging the confederate battle flag in direct opposition to the African-American Civil Rights Movement during the early 1950’s. In contrast to the events following the appearance of the nooses however, the occasional spotting of a confederate flag on University of Delaware’s campus meets surprisingly little public reaction.

News of the scene at Mitchell hall rapidly spread across the University of Delaware campus and plagued most student’s social media accounts for days. Even today, over a century after the peak of lynching in the U.S., students took the symbolism of the ropes very strongly. In response to a survey question asking them to rank how seriously they took the incident on a scale of one to five points (five being the most serious), student’s responded with an impressive average of approximately four points. Students most predominantly reported a sense of fear and anxiety surrounding the incident, followed closely by stress and disappointment. It’s important to note that the aforementioned emotions were in no way limited to black students, as the majority of the survey takers were white.

To more fully understand student’s reactions to the event, University of Delaware freshman Javonte Perry was interviewed about his personal experience regarding the news. Perhaps more stoic in his initial reaction than the average person, Perry claimed his initial thoughts concerned feeling unappreciated by

the campus as a black student. Shrugging his shoulders, he also described feeling that in being part of a minority group on campus, the symbolism of the nooses might mean a lot of students at the university are still racist. After some deliberation, Perry also seemed to admit to some feelings of fear and anxiety; “I didn’t know if I could trust everyone, it made me feel on edge, like I might have to defend myself.” The idea of three ropes hanging from trees on campus gave Perry “a feeling that something was going to happen after the noose, like the noose was a warning.” Many other students on the campus shared Perry’s uneasy reaction following the report of the symbolic scene at Mitchell Hall.

Symbols are absolutely everywhere in society, taking on infinite meanings and levels of power. Many symbols are very defined and simplistic, such as a red octagon to symbolize a stop or an arrow to symbolize direction. However, several symbols embody much more complex and powerful abstract meaning that can evoke incredible reactions in humans. For example, the Christian cross could merely be a plus sign with slightly imperfect line lengths and yet its image embodies over two millenniums of human behaviors, architecture, wars, and beliefs the majority of our nation identifies with. In principle, symbols come to represent everything they have been associated with throughout their history and a noose hanging from a tree certainly holds intense cultural meanings in the United States.

The period of 1880 to 1930 is known as the lynching era of the southern United States and most notably contributes to the fear and racism associated with the noose today. Over two thousand documented lynchings occurred during this period, almost entirely carried out by angry white mobs against black citizens(Tolnay). Possibly a result of this extraordinarily racially unbalanced history of lynching, University of Delaware survey respondents overwhelming stated that the appearance of the nooses symbolized hate and race more strongly than it symbolized death. An incredible array of reasons were given in an attempt to justify the lynching of black people through the turn of the nineteenth century, including accusations of black men trying to vote, entering a white woman’s room, and testifying against a white man. Obviously, the punishment did not fit the supposed crimes and was meant to carry out much more than scaled justice for any victim.

Following the end of slavery and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that qualified African Americans as citizens of the United States, white supremacists lost most of their legal ability to violently suppress the black population. The law failed to stop the white masses of the U.S. South from carrying out their own idea of vigilante justice in the form of lynching however. According to Stewart Tolnay, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, lynching punishments were meant to carry out three additional functions: “to maintain social order over the black population”, “to suppress or eliminate black competitors” and to “preserve the privileged status of the white aristocracy.” The planning of lynching in public places was designed to serve a symbolic message to the black community about who was truly in power.

Over a century later, the issue of racist symbolism in our society is hardly limited to the University of Delaware’s central green or even nooses for that matter. While nooses have been secured as an unacceptable symbol of racism and hate in the United States through both legal framework and our modern cultural values, the Confederate battle flag is a much more contentiously debated image. While a noose may be much more direct and obvious in it’s use, it shares the same symbolism of white supremacy. To understand the symbolic symmetries between the Confederate battle flag and the noose in America, it's vital to first acquire a basic history of the flag.

The Confederate battle flag began its long and intricate journey in 1862, waving above the Army of Northern Virginia, led by General Robert E. Lee. In origin, the Confederate battle flag was the flag hundreds of thousands of men looked up to while essentially fighting to maintain the cruel enslavement of black Americans. The flag’s promotion did not end with Lee’s surrender but instead went on to become one of the most recognizable symbols of the U.S. South. From the end of the Civil War through the 1940’s, Confederate heritage groups used the flag only semi-regularly and simply as a means of honoring the Confederacy and its veterans. While the Confederate soldiers cause is debatable in its values, the flag was almost exclusively used to pay respect and give dignity to veterans and fallen soldiers for their service to southern states.

Despite the efforts of Confederate heritage organizations to prevent their perceived misuse of the Confederate Battle Flag in the late 1940’s, it became the prominent symbol of the Dixiecrat party. The Dixiecrat party arose in direct response to the civil rights movement and defined itself as standing for the segregation of races. At the same time, the flag’s image spread from use in honorable memorials and ceremonies honoring Confederate soldiers to American popular culture in its widespread use on clothing and just about any other object you can imagine. Most of the controversy regarding display of the Confederate flag today comes from it’s use throughout the last 60 years as a symbol of direct opposition to the rights of Black Americans.

Ask anyone displaying the Confederate flags image and they’ll likely tell you it is simply a symbol of their southern pride. But if you assume the individual is just and true in the claim, imagine the extreme coincidence of the increased appearance of Confederate battle flags during the very same years desegregation was moving forward and more opportunities were opening to black Americans. The broader use of the Confederate battle flag is not a tradition that has symbolized southern pride over the 150 years since the civil war, but rather a relatively newfound practice that grew in direct opposition to black Americans push for equality. As CNN’s Sally Kohn put it, “to call the flag ‘heritage’ is to gloss over the ugly reality of history.”

As seen in cities across America over the last few years, racist-fueled violence is not limited to the black and white newspapers of the last generation. One particular incident stands out in it cold-blooded tactics of symbolic fear-inspiring racism. On the night of June 17th, 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine members of a historical black church after attending a prayer meeting with them(Chuck). Roof is a young man who developed a deeply hateful and racist attitude that inspired him to attempt to initiate a race war. Roof planned the attack for months during which he posted videos online of himself waving the Confederate battle flag while employing numerous racial slurs. The horror of the event led multiple southern states to remove the flag altogether from their statehouse grounds. Promoters of the flag will have an even weaker argument in claiming the flag as a symbol of southern pride when even Southern Capitals won’t raise the flag.

As University of Delaware’s acting president Nancy M. Targett put it in her email to students following the noose incident, “such cowardly and reprehensible acts are clearly designed to intimidate and frighten, and they are unacceptable”. With sixty-nine percent of black American adults viewing the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism as of 2015 (Jones), the flag clearly serves as an intimidation mechanism as well. Targett also claimed that if the university community works together, they can attain the “true campus [they] envision for [themselves]” where “safety and inclusiveness of [their] campus are [their] top priorities.” These general values need to be universal in our society and applied to all aspects of our decisions. Accepting the display of a flag that a majority of the targeted community believes to encapsulate decades of extreme violence and intimidation is not safe or inclusive.

If all of the perverted uses of the Confederate flag over this country’s history is still not enough to convince the most patriotic of all southerners to take down their battle flags, maybe the thoughts of their own great General Lee will change their mind. Lee intentionally kept the flag and Confederate uniforms out of sight at his own funeral in 1870. He was noted for saying “I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

We have a choice as a society to be a united people or to continue to accept the perpetuation of symbols that instill an unjust and irrational divide among us. When we wave the Confederate battle flag, we are publicly agreeing with over a century of violence and discrimination. Knowing the image of nooses on University of Delaware’s campus created a sense of fear and inequality in the community, the campus acted swiftly to take them down. We know the Confederate battle flag carries the same racist values but yet it freely leaves its mark across the country unchecked by our conscious.

Works Cited

Chuck, Elizabeth. “Charleston Church Shooter Dylann Roof 'Caught Us With Our Eyes Closed'”. NBC News, nbcnews.com, 10 Sep 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

Humberston, Noah. "Campus Reactions to Symbols of Racism." Survey. Qualtrics. 12 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

Jones, Jeffrey M. “Democrats' Views on Confederate Flag Increasingly Negative”.
Gallup, Gallup, 8 July 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

Kohn, Sally. “Taking down Confederate flag is not enough.” CNN, Cable News Network, 24 June 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.

Perry, Javonte. Personal interview. 12 Nov. 2015.

Targett, Nancy. “A message to the University community”. Message to all members of the University of Delaware. 23 September 2015. E-mail.

Tolnay, Stewart E., and E.M. Beck. “A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930.” Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.