Suppose you're born and bred in the south and much taken with its cultural heritage, tradition of hospitality, cuisine, manners, costume, and attitude. Suppose that as a person born in recent decades you regard the old Confederate flag as a symbol of your region. Perhaps your grand-pappy fought for what he thought was his nation, or region that seceded and was trying to become the Confederate States of America. Suppose you don't have a racist bone in your body and have no truck with slavery, Jim Crow, or either desegregation or integration in public places, schools, etc.
You just identify with the region you grew up in and would like to wave your regional flag at football games, shout rebel yells, sing Dixie on public occasions, etc.
You just have pride in your state and region and don't want others telling you what you can and cannot wear.
Abraham Lincoln, incidentally, regarded the song Dixie as being one of the most rousing tunes he'd ever heard, so on the day the news came to Washington of Lee's surrender to Grant, the crowds were going wild with joy over the successful conclusion to the long, costly war. Over 600,000 killed, both sides, soldier and civilian. A band assembled outside the White House. Lincoln asked them to play Dixie. Said he regarded it as a spoil of war.
Father Abraham had a sense of humor, and irony, and symbolism. He was letting the South know it wasn't all bad and would be welcome back, if it ever left. There was some question about that, because if it had never left, then the southern states that seceded were entitled to resume their seats in Congress. The North wasn't about to let that happen. So the South was kept out.
To consolidate its victory, the North pushed the Civil War amendments through Congress, which, not having the South to block passage, ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, the 14th, Equal Protection and Due Process, and the 15th, right to vote for Blacks.
Only after the Southern states changed their constitutions to reflect acceptance of the above were they permitted to resume their seats in Congress.
The South remained an economic backwater for the next century as poor whites struggled to survive and tried to look down on poor blacks who received the even shorter end of the stick, with no economic protection, no legal protection, and the opposite of social protection, called Jim Crow segregation laws.
As a result of the well-earned animosity generated between the races during this period, the symbols of the Old South are raise difficult emotions and issues when displayed today. Our troops in Iraq, those from our South, often fly Confederate flags alongside Old Glory, the national emblem. Why? Because the South also has a military tradition that makes Southern boys formidable fighters, as U.S. Grant attests in his great autobiography; just not as good as he was, though.
On the lawns of southern statehouses, i.e. the state capitol buildings, often appear their Civil War heroes and generals (they call it the War Between the States down South). On the peaks and flagpoles fly Confederate Flags. Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy and wartime home of Jefferson Davis, the C.S.A. president, has an avenue of statues featuring Confederate heroes. There was a hullabaloo when a statue of Arthur Ashe, the late tennis great, was proposed to be added. Ashe was Black. I'm not sure his statue ever made it or not.
A student from Augusta,Georgia, one of the seceded states which was burned to the ground by Grant's favorite general, William T. Sherman in his famous march to the sea, with effects dramatized in "Gone With The Wind," who joined in one of our Saturday morning Bridge-Walks recently, advised that when a bank placed a billboard ad featuring a Five-dollar bill with its portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the locals objected to the portrait of Lincoln. Old animosities die hard down South.
The Confederate flag controversy has thus tended to divide southerners, including black southerners, into two warring camps over the issue of whether it should be flown over the capitol. When conventions started pulling out of the state because black opponents threatened to boycott the businesses of the attendee companies, the choice was clear. The state could have the symbol or the money.
Which do you think is more powerful, symbols or do-re-mi?
If you guessed that green is more powerful than the red and gray stars and bars of the confederate flag, you'd be right. The flag came down to keep the convention. They don't call it the Almighty dollar fer nothin.'
Well now it seems that a young (white) lady who attends high school in a southern state wants to wear and display southern regalia in school. The school wants to throw her out unless she obeys the rule not to. She even has some Black support. Here's the AP report.
What should be the rule regarding the wearing of symbols that are offensive to some, but not others, and to offensive messages?
In formulating your answer, you might want to take a look at Cohen v. California, the "Fuck the Draft" case from the Vietnam War. The case referred to in the news article is likely to be Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), where a student wore an armband protesting the Vietnam war to high school and was thrown out for violating the rules against demonstrating or protesting. The Supreme Court emphasizing the lack of disruption caused by the wearing of the symbol, allowed her back in, holding the rule to be a violation of her freedom of speech. Imagine, the Constitution outweighs the school board, just as it sometimes outweighs the cops.
The really big question in these days of presidentially inspired eavesdropping and interminable detentions is whether the Constitution outweighs the president. It did in 1952 or so, in the Youngstown Steel case when HST took over the steel mills to keep the production of tanks and guns flowing during the war in Korea, despite the refusal of Congress to delegate that power to him. Pres. Nixon also found out that the law was heavier than he was in the Watergate Tapes case, U.S. v. Nixon or vice versa.