Time for Confederate flag to go

This editorial originally appeared in the Thursday edition of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

The U.S. has always been a country of symbols. The eagle. Lady Liberty’s torch. Red, white and blue. So it’s not surprising that another symbol — the battle flag of the Confederacy, or the “stars and bars” — has stirred passionate debate in the wake of a brutal mass killing by a man who embraced it.

The history of the flag and what it represents has been complicated by the passage of 150 years since the end of the war in which it flew over the armies of the South. But, at long last, it’s time to relegate the flag to the halls of museums, rather than America’s public spaces. To continue its public display would only slow the halting, difficult healing process underway for a century and a half — and still ongoing today.

The most recent furor over the flag was occasioned by the killing of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, by Dylann Roof, 22. In the days since the shooting, details have been unearthed about Roof’s racist beliefs, espousal of white supremacist doctrine and desire to start a race war in the U.S.

Even at the scene of the shooting itself, Roof was unequivocal about the reasons for his actions. Witnesses reported Roof told them he was “there to shoot black people.”

In the wake of the mass shooting, the fact that the Confederate battle flag still flies at the South Carolina capitol — not to mention in many other locations across the U.S. — has been seen by many as emblematic of our nation’s continued inability to deal with issues of racism that persist centuries after its founding.

Supporters of the “stars and bars” remaining a part of American life have said the flag is a symbol of Southern heritage, not racial hatred, and that it has been improperly appropriated by those seeking to make it a racist emblem. It’s certainly true that the flag means different things to different people. Surely there were many soldiers within the Confederate ranks, as well as residents in Confederate states, who weren’t pro-slavery — good and decent people who believed the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal.”

What’s more, the flag’s meaning has become muddy in the more than a century since the Civil War, as has Americans’ conception of the reasons the war was fought in the first place. In a 2011 study by the Pew Charitable Trust, 48 percent of U.S. residents surveyed listed states’ rights as the primary reason for the war, with only 38 percent answering that the issue of slavery was the primary reason.

Even at the time, seceding states often didn’t mention slavery as a reason for joining the Confederacy, referring instead in official proclamations to states’ rights issues as being central to their dispute with the federal government.

But that language only obfuscates the fact that the right those states were willing to leave the union to protect was the right to maintain the system of slavery. And the Confederacy’s leaders made no bones about their views.

Taking issue with the U.S. founding fathers’ notion that all men are created equal, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens said in 1861, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — the subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”

This history is compounded by the flag’s resurrection in popular culture by figures such as former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who used it as a symbol of southern states’ resistance to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. While the legacy of the Confederacy has dulled somewhat due to its distance from the present, the same cannot be said of the overt hatred and discrimination experienced by many living in this country.

For these reasons, it’s time for those in South Carolina and across the U.S. to put the Confederate battle flag away. We should not delude ourselves by thinking this will fix racial injustice — changing people’s hearts and minds is far more difficult than lowering a flag from its pole, and the heart and mind are where prejudice lies. But putting one of America’s most divisive banners away is one step along that path, and one we should take.