CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

Ghosts of the South

By STEVE LOPEZ

Old ideas die hard in the rural South. And progress has made loyalists more militant about holding onto their idea of Dixie: its history and heritage, its family and sovereignty, its thumb in the eye of Northern culture and, for some, its codes of racial superiority and subjugation.

Last week Mississippians voted 2 to 1 to retain a state flag dominated by the Confederate emblem—the last one in the South, since Georgia redesigned its flag Jan. 30. A coalition of business and civil rights leaders spent close to $700,000 arguing that the old flag insults African Americans and repels investment, but only 18 of Mississippi’s 82 counties voted to change it.

South Carolina last year removed the Confederate flag from atop the state capitol, but the N.A.A.C.P. still boycotts the state because the flag now flies elsewhere on the capitol grounds. Last month in Virginia, when Governor Jim Gilmore replaced the old, pro-rebel state proclamation of Confederate History Month with a new one honoring "all Virginians who served in the Civil War," the Sons of Confederate Veterans condemned him for "honoring people who . . . murdered, raped and pillaged." In Selma, Ala., a battleground in the 1960s civil rights movement, whites are militant in defense of a new statue of Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest, even though he was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mississippi flag A longtime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and headmaster of a private Mississippi school, William Earl Faggert helped gather 212,000 signatures in favor of the successful effort to leave the rebel symbol on the state flag. The flag has flown since 1894. (In other Southern states, flags bearing the Confederate symbol weren’t raised until after federal antisegregation legislation was enacted in the 1960s, a fact that routs the "history-and-heritage" argument the way Grant routed Lee.) Faggert contends that anyone who understands history respects the flag and rejects the notion that it is a sign of slavery or hatred. It was under that flag that his ancestors defended home and family against an invading army. "The whole issue of race is being used by our opponents to inflame emotion."

Dolphus Weary, executive director of a religious group called Mission Mississippi, and Lee Paris, a neighbor of Weary’s who runs a real estate business, were both on the committee that recommended the removal of the Confederate symbol. When Weary was growing up, that flag meant he wouldn’t ride the new bus to the better school. It meant he wouldn’t live on the right side of the tracks. It meant his relatives could cook and clean for white people but couldn’t sit at the same table. "And I was taught that the reason we seceded from the North was to maintain that system," he says.

Paris says that although he will always love the state flag, the Ku Klux Klan stole it from him and made it a symbol of hate. Because of his friendship with Weary and other African Americans, and because "as a Christian man I cannot do that which harms my brother," Paris voted to bring the flag down.

—TIME, April 30, 2001