Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 26, 1993 TAG: 9307260079
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BONNIE V. WINSTON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DANVILLE LENGTH: Long
"Our nation is going to heck in a handbasket because of the lowering of our morals and people . . . trying further to eliminate a vital part of our birthright."
"The flag which flies at the museum is part of history. . . . While we may not agree with parts of our history, we cannot and should not continue to erase it. . . . I cannot condone the wearing of the Malcolm X stuff, or the flashing of the ANC colors or the deafening rolling boom boxes with their rap music. They are as divisive as anything else. However, I would not censor those who feel this is an expression of whatever they choose to call it."
"Instead of black people being offended by this flag, it should stand for something every time they see it. Blacks should say to themselves, `Look how far God [creator of the universe] has allowed us to come since this flag first came on the scene.' "
Or another view:
"Are we supposed to be proud of slavery, prejudice and hate? What message is this sending to the younger generation? . . . Aren't there better aspects of American history to be proud of? Or is the prejudice of the past all that my generation has to look forward to? Instead of flying the flag of the Confederacy, can't we just fly the American flag and simply be proud to be American?"
This summer, more than 125 years after the Civil War's end, skirmishes over when and whether the Confederate flag should fly have erupted from Virginia Beach to Winchester, and plenty of places in between.
At the Beach, a proposed "Dixie Stampede" playhouse backed by Dolly Parton's production company was derailed by criticism that its treatment of Civil War themes would be insensitive. In Winchester, officials dropped plans to incorporate the city seal, which includes a likeness of a Confederate flag, into a new municipal flag.
In Stafford County, a white Circuit Court judge ordered a Confederate flag removed from a law library display when one of his black colleagues on the bench complained.
But nowhere is the conflict more wrenching than in Danville, the town from which Jefferson Davis ran the remnants of the Confederacy in the war's closing days. Protests over removal of the flag from its perch outside a local museum - the last building from which Davis governed - led the museum board last week to authorize its occasional display at so-far-unannounced times.
The Danville battle has been drawn mostly along racial lines - whites clamoring to protect what many still see as a proud history, blacks pushing to eliminate lingering vestiges of a painful past.
To outside experts, the struggle over this symbol of the South spotlights the searing separation in perception and viewpoint between some blacks and whites, not only in Danville, but everywhere the Confederate flag has become a flash point.
It also points to the unfinished healing between the races - particularly in the South - more than a century after Emancipation.
"There is a sense among whites that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the '60s fixed everything. That problems that took 350 years to develop - slavery and Jim Crow - were all fixed within 15 years," said Andrew M. Manis, associate professor of religion at Averett College in Danville.
"But the same arguments they are making now for the flag are ones we heard during the '50s and '60s during the height of segregation: `Our colored folks were happy with the arrangements here until these outside agitators came in and stirred things up.' "
In Danville, white anger has focused on Joyce E. Glaise. Two days before the flag's removal from the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History on June 4, the black city councilwoman publicly questioned spending $106,000 in tax dollars to support a building that displays a symbol offensive to many in this community of 63,000.
"To me, the American flag represents freedom, unity and togetherness," said Glaise, a 42-year-old Danville native. "When you fly the Confederate flag, you get the total opposite - that one part of the country still wants to be separate.
"You don't see freedom in a Confederate flag. You don't see unity in a Confederate flag. I don't think that's what the museum meant by flying it. But it recalls people marching around, using it to terrorize blacks, saying, `Stay in your place,' if there is such a thing."
The flag caught in the Danville tempest is not the one most commonly associated with the Confederacy. Here, the storm is over the third national flag of the South, adopted and used only a month before the Civil War ended. In the upper left corner of its white field is a small version of the Confederate "battle flag," the star-laden blue X against a swatch of red.
Ironically, Glaise had no vote in the decision to lower the flag, which was flying from the front lawn of the city-owned but privately run museum.
Directors of the museum - 19 whites and three blacks - voted quickly, quietly and unanimously to take the flag down.
The museum's board is headed by Vice Mayor E. Linwood Wright, 57, who is white. As chairman, Wright had no vote on the flag's removal and had refused to take a public stand on the issue.
But Wright led the effort at "compromise," as he termed it, to restore the flag to the museum's front on certain Confederate holidays. In an unannounced meeting last Monday, the board - by an undisclosed vote - decided to fly the flag again in conjunction with "educational" programs.
Wright and museum officials refused to say on what days and when the flag would rise again. The programs are to be determined by the museum's director.
Wright argued that the museum has unfairly "been put in the middle of this." And he stressed that the flag wasn't removed out of sensitivity to Danville's black community, but out of "fear of litigation or jeopardizing the assets of the museum."
The Rev. William Avon Keen, 36, head of Danville's chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had lowered the flag in protest during a 1992 Martin Luther King birthday commemoration march. Keen, who is black, met with the museum's director the day after Glaise's remarks and threatened to take the banner down again if it weren't stored inside.
On Wednesday, Keen accused Wright and the board of "knuckling under to pressure from hate groups." And, promising to respond to the occasional raising of the flag, Keen said it would be a "mockery" for the museum to fly it on the January holiday King shares with Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Keen, who has piercing memories of integrating the museum as a youth when it was a whites-only public library, said his organization doesn't believe in violence.
"But you cannot keep offending a group of people and expect nothing to happen," Keen said. "You cannot fly a symbol of hatred and say you are for all people. The Jewish community said, `Never again.' What are we supposed to do, be quiet? Ignore it?"
The Danville NAACP and most of the rest of the city's black leaders have done just that.
The NAACP's head, the Rev. Doyle J. Thomas, 77, is one of two blacks on City Council.
"The NAACP hasn't gotten involved because we don't have time for this ignorant mess," Thomas said. "We are busy trying to keep our kids in school, keep our young men out of jail, make our neighborhoods safer places.
"All the flag represents is defeat and treason, and if they want to celebrate that, then I say let all of them . . . fly it from every flagpole they want," he continued. "I don't know why anybody would want to celebrate defeat and treason. Do you?"
Meanwhile, Confederate flags are springing up all over Danville - from front lawns and porches to car antennas and poles anchored in the beds of pickup trucks.
A surplus store has sold more than 500 in about four weeks.
"If Joyce Glaise thought she had a problem with one flag, now she's got a bigger problem, because there are lots of them," cackled one white man who had a small Confederate flag suspended from his car's antenna.
The week following the flag's removal, 75 local residents packed council chambers demanding the flag be restored and threatening to vote out of office any council member who didn't support its return.
More than 150 flag supporters showed up at an ensuing rally, staged around the museum by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. More than 7,000 calls to a special "talk-back" telephone line at the local newspaper were received from people wanting the flag back up. And most recently, a protesting "Heritage Run" caravan of flag wavers has threatened to continue weekly motorcades through Danville - including black neighborhoods - until the Confederate flag is unfurled once more.
"Symbols are over-arching," said Frank O. Blechman Jr., 46, a Newport News native and now faculty member at George Mason University's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. "They have both a polarizing and revitalizing quality to them."
The flag issue, like the issue of a Martin Luther King birthday holiday, "disguises the real question of who is entitled to what," he said.
"There is a terrible confusion in this country between equity and equality," he said. "When we said we were going to remove the barriers to equality, some people thought that made everything equal. But they didn't see the ditch that was left behind."
by CNB