Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 22, 1993 TAG: 9302220246
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
REBEL FLAG ALSO STIRS BAD MEMORIES
JOHN T. Briscoe's Feb. 6 letter ("Georgia's Gov. Zell Miller dishonors his state's history") concerning the Confederate battle flag presents a clear case of a symbol having very different meanings for different people.I am a 45-year-old white male, was born in North Carolina and have lived in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia almost all of my life. I suppose that makes me as much a Southerner as anyone.
When I was in grade school in the 1950s, my school was closed by elected officials waving the Confederate battle flag, and the school was kept closed by those same people. When my school was finally reopened, people waving that flag lined the streets leading to the school and shouted threats, screamed hate at me and the other students, and threw rocks at my bus.
All through my grade- and high-school years, people waving the battle flag burned buses, phoned bomb threats and occasionally murdered a child to demonstrate their commitment to a cause they used the Confederate battle flag to represent.
When I attended the University of Georgia, hate literature, with the Confederate battle flag as a logo, was distributed on the campus by people with the flag worn as a badge on their sleeves.
I do not doubt the word of the man who conceived of joining the Confederate battle flag and the Georgia state seal. He maintains the flag was not motivated by integration. But even a cursory reading of the history of the '50s makes it hard to believe resistance to integration and adoption of the flag just happened at the same time. If the timing was coincidental, it is surely the most unfortunate coincidence that has ever occurred.
I do not think first of "our great heritage and the people involved" when I see the Confederate battle flag. I think of hate and violence, of threats screamed at small children by adults, of closed schools and elected officials who closed them, and of a part of the recent past that we should do our utmost to overcome.
I wonder if our long-dead Confederate soldiers and their families, who suffered so much for a cause they believed was just, would want a flag they fought and died to support to be used as a symbol of hate and intolerance. I hope not. RICHARD G. ODERWALD BLACKSBURG