Sadly, as the annual time to recognize Martin Luther King Jr.’s opposition and resistance to discrimination and oppression arrives, some still maintain the mentality he opposed and resisted, even with public demonstrations. As usual, such groups still display the erroneous revision of the Rebel Battle Flag, which is not the “Confederate” flag.
In my youth, commercialists cleverly changed the shape of the Rebel flag from square to rectangular, and apparently made considerable profit along with the sale of Davy Crockett coonskin caps, Rebel and Yankee caps, rubber Jim Bowie knives and the like. The actual Confederate flag bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Rebel flag, which is accurately nicknamed the “Stars and Bars.”
The actual Confederate flag flew over southern state capitals only during the brief period of Confederate secession. The American flag flew over southern statehouses during the decades of legal slavery prior to the Civil War, and the decades of redefined Jim Crow slavery for the next century. The American and North Carolina State flags flew over our statehouse during the Wilmington massacre of 1898.
The history books N.C. schools utilized in my formative years failed to mention the Wilmington massacre, or accurately describe the cruelty and brutality of American human bondage. Detailed accounts were scarce, until the advent of the computer and the Internet, but I can find no evidence that the white mobs who murdered blacks carried Rebel or Confederate flags.
Neither can I find any reports that Confederate or Rebel flags were carried by the mobs who committed the Atlanta massacre of 1906, or the East St. Louis massacre of 1917. I can find no reference to Confederate symbols during the legalized murder of 39 Blacks in Houston, Texas in 1917. There is no historical mention of Confederate symbols during the massacres, too numerous to list, during the Red Summer of 1919. Or the massacre and destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and the Rosewood, Florida, massacre of 1928.
The American flag flew over the period of Peonage, which started after the Civil War, and lasted almost until World War II. Historical accounts of Peonage, buried so deep in our nation’s shame that few have ever heard of it, report conditions even more brutal than accepted, open American slavery. Pictures of hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members marching in Washington, D.C., in the 1920s, reveal that they carried neither Confederate nor Rebel, but American flags. A replica of the actual Confederate flag can be seen at the beginning of David O. Selznick’s motion picture, “Gone With The Wind,” but discriminatory laws tolerated in our nation in 1939, would not allow black actresses Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen to attend the world premier in Atlanta Georgia.
Thorough study of our nation’s history reveals that the Civil War was not fought over cotton-raising slaves, but slave-raised cotton. Northern factory owners wanted southern slaves in the cotton fields just as much as southern planters did. Northern factory workers wanted slaves producing northern mill-job security in southern fields, rather than freed slaves competing with them for jobs in northern mills. The northern blockade of southern ports was simply to force southern cotton producers to sell their cotton to northern industrialists at deflated prices, and buy finished goods from the same at inflated prices, due to the lack of European competition.
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the southern states in rebellion, therefore it freed no slaves whatsoever. Four northern border states continued the practice of human slavery throughout and after the war, until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. The only slaves freed during the Civil War were purchased from slave owners in Washington, D.C., with taxpayer dollars in an attempt to prevent intervention on behalf of the South by European nations which had abolished slavery, but were not above purchasing slave-raised cotton for their mills.
America’s southern states seceded over the right to engage in what is know today as “free market capitalism.” The Underground Railroad stopped at the Canadian border, not the Mason-Dixon line. Escaped slaves caught traveling to Canadian freedom in Northern states were returned to their southern owners in obedience to northern Fugitive Slave Laws.
The abolition of slavery, which some southerners as well as only some northerners advocated, became a justification excuse after the fact. Still, slavery was simply redefined, and continued with discriminatory “Jim Crow” legislation. Isn’t that why the ending of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech included the words “free at last?” The flag that flew over centuries of legal abuse America’s people of color endured, still flies over our national and our state capitals today. The modified, erroneous, rectangular flag white supremacists adopted as their symbol of racism is not the Confederate flag.
The Confederate flag, nothing like the “Stars and Bars,” was the flag of southerners who fought for the right to market their farm products in an open, international market, unrestricted by unfair tariffs designed to allow northern industrialists to profit from southern slavery. Did northern mill owners, who employed immigrant wage-slaves, want the southern slaves freed?
What do you think?
Robert C. Currie Jr. is a Laurinburg resident and can be reached at commonfolks@bellsouth.net.
