Black artist will burn, bury the Confederate flag across the South on Memorial Day
Opinion
by David A. Love | May 22, 2015 at 12:16 AM


Can you think of a better way for a black man to spend Memorial Day than to burn a Confederate flag?

As was reported in the Orlando Sentinel, an artist will do exactly that, with plans to make it happen in all the states throughout the former Confederacy.

John Sims, an artist from Sarasota, Florida, is honoring the constitutional right of self-expression by staging burnings and burials of the Rebel flag, that troublesome symbol of the Old South that many, particularly African-Americans, associate with slavery, white supremacy and state-sponsored terrorism and lynchings.

“We are in America, and people have the right to fly whatever flag [they want],” Sims said. “And I have the right to bury whatever flag, and to burn whatever flag.”

Sims noted that the Dixie flag, which the South flew during the Civil War, is associated with many toxic memories of the American experience, especially from the black perspective. “There’s a notion of ‘Southern Heritage’ and who owns [that], but a very important part of Southern culture is the African-American experience.… The Confederate flag is a flag of terror from its use by the Klan in the ’20s to the anti-civil-rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s,” Sims said.

“The flag is almost too toxic to handle, and for those who do, I’m suspicious of their engagement. Are you in denial?”

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To be sure, a number of people will disapprove of Sims’ form of artistic expression, but their own sentiments in support of that flag are misplaced and indefensible.

Although the Confederacy lost the Civil War and surrendered 150 years ago, some white folks refuse to let it go. Still fighting a war to keep blacks down and poor whites in poverty — because the slave system did not need white labor — they simply cannot escape the nineteenth century. As Euan Hague wrote in Politico Magazine in April, the passion for the Confederate flag has not ended for many Americans. Neo-Confederate sentiments seemed to be in relative hiding until the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, the symbols of the Confederacy are all around us. The state of Texas just went before the U.S. Supreme Court and defended the placement of the flag on Texas license plates.

Recently, students at the University of Texas at Austin passed a resolution to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its prominent spot on campus. And at the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Students for Education Reform are demanding the renaming of Saunders Hall — a university building which honors Confederate colonel and KKK Grand Dragon William Saunders — to Hurston Hall, in honor of Zora Neal Hurston, the first black UNC student prior to integration.

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Although defenders of that flag may want to convince us that it has nothing to do with slavery, or segregation, or hating black people, we know better. After all, aside from serving as an official flag of the Confederacy and a symbol used by groups such as the Klan, the Confederate battle flag played a prominent role against the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. After the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, states such as Georgia reintroduced the flag in protest, while other states incorporated the secessionist symbol into the state flag, and others flew the battle flag on top of the state house. After Georgia changed its flag in 2003, Mississippi remains the only state flag to incorporate the Confederate emblem.

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Treaties are the law of the land, and they trump previously passed legislation. But, first, according to the Constitution a Congressional – Executive Agreement is not a treaty. And second, even if it were, it would not trump the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. So, Federalism, as expressed in Amendment 10, means that the states of the union have a limited sphere of state sovereignty that cannot be breached by either the Federal government, or by treaties or international agreements concluded by it.

And that sphere of state sovereignty is precisely in the area of providing for the general welfare of its citizens. If a state in the US decides, for example, that the Federal minimum wage isn’t high enough for the general welfare of its citizens, it is free, right now, to pass a minimum wage at any level exceeding the Federal minimum that it thinks is desirable. Multinational corporations have nothing to say about this in any tribunal, but under the TPP they could sue the State for lost profits and collect damages.

So, if enacted, the TPP would violate Federalism, state sovereignty, and therefore the Constitution of the United States, in a way that the Federal Government cannot now do. It is clearly an unconstitutional treaty, which the United States has no right to conclude.