Time for Mississippi to Come Together on the Confederate Flag

[struggle4progress]

Wednesday, August 31, 2016 4:46 p.m. CDT
By Duvalier Malone

... on June 7, 1998, ... James Byrd, was walking home from a party. During his walk, three white men approached him and offered him a ride home ...

The three men ... chained his legs to the back of their truck and dragged him for more than three miles. When they finally stopped the truck, James was dead, his body in pieces ...

... The first one to go to trial, John William King, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He had several tattoos: a lynching of a black man on a cross, the Nazi swastika, the words "Aryan Pride" and the Confederate flag ...

This is the legacy of the Confederate symbol. This symbol is found in places of death, and it is often comfortably surrounded by other symbols of hate. This is the reason why several Mississippi universities championed the removal of the Mississippi state flag from their campuses. It's because this flag is decorated with an emblem that represents murder and injustice ...

http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2016/aug/31/its-time-mississippi-come-together-confederate-fla/

[guillaumeb]

1. They claim that this flag is heritage, and it is.

A heritage of hate, and servitude, and genocide.

Recommended.

[forest444]

2. Good ole heritage - of 1961 vintage.

That's the year the current flag was adopted. I wonder why...

[guillaumeb]

3. Well, Tea Partiers do say that they want to take their country back.

Apparently to 1961. Or earlier, if possible.

[forest444]

4. Or 1861. And the best part is:

Most Southern whites were literally worse off than slaves during the Antebellum/Confederate era.

I lived in Mississippi for a number of years, and the attachment a lot of Southern right-wingers feel for the Confederacy - and the vindictive rancor they feel for "Yankees" and for African-Americans (whom, somehow, they blame for bringing about the Confederacy's defeat) - just can't be overstated.

It seems cliché to say that all this irrational rancor explains southern Republican extremism today - but amazingly, it's no exaggeration. The power of some delusions, I guess.