Two weeks later, the flag in South Carolina’s house of government was finally removed for good. Then, after white supremacist Dylann Roof endorsed the Confederate flag and murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, activist Bree Newsome shimmied up the pole and removed it in a galvanising act of civil disobedience. In 2000, after years of protest, South Carolina legislators moved the Confederate flag to the State House’s grounds. The state of Georgia, where resistance to desegregation was fierce, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag.Ī few years later, in 1961, neighbouring state South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag above its state Capitol. When civil rights activism was at its most visible, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white Southerners became firmly attached to the flag. From that point, the flag was clearly associated with racist opposition to civil rights and with umbrage at perceived government intrusion into the lives of individuals. These “ Dixiecrats” adopted the Confederate battle flag as their party’s emblem. Truman and the Democratic Party’s relatively sympathetic stance on civil rights. In the late 1940s, a new political party of Southerners opposed Harry S. I am not your nice 'Mammy': How racist stereotypes still impact women But as African Americans began to make headway in the fight for civil rights, starting during World War II, symbols such as the Confederate flag became even more important to those who felt affronted by their gains. These two films buttressed a political economy that relied on a cheap labour force of disenfranchised Black Americans. The battlefield in Gone with the Wind (1939). The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy. It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan. As it stated in an intertitle, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright”. The movie’s second half cemented the theme of reconciling white Southerners and white Northerners. In the very next shot, however, the injured Cameron is rescued from the no-man’s land between trenches by his longtime family friend, Northerner and US Army commander, Phil Stoneman. In the 1915 box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation, for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon. By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about - that is, enslavement - by the 1890s, they remade the meaning of the war.įrom Louisiana to Queensland: how American slave owners started again in AustraliaĬonfederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. New narratives depicted the war as a righteous, though tragic, struggle over “states’ rights”. The reembrace of white Southerners into the nation showed a desire to “heal” the nation by downplaying the horrors of enslavement and the struggle to end it.
White Southerners, who had retained their land, implemented unjust legal and labour systems, underpinned by violence and racist ideas about black people’s inferiority. The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurlingĪfter a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction, the US military withdrew its forces. For 155 years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.
In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war.
The ensuing four-year Civil War between the CSA and US was resolved in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the near-abolition of enslavement.