Just ask a modern-day German about the Nazi flag.
And ask Kettering Fairmont High School students how they feel about the small procession of pickup trucks parading the Confederate flag every morning.
Many students are outraged. They’re offended.
And they’re embarrassed. They fear it gives the wrong impression of a student body that is growing increasingly diverse and accepting of each other.
So who are these students in the flag brigade? Are they swaggering, rude, proudly racist?
I met them in the school parking lot the other day, and they are polite and soft-spoken, eager to explain they aren’t intending to be racist or to offend anyone.
“My ancestors fought for the Confederacy,” explained junior Joseph Loyd. “Some kids in my class think it means slavery, and it’s wrong, but for me the rebel flag is my family’s history.”
Junior Andrew Spicer said, “For me, it’s a symbol of freedom, that we can fly any flag we want.”
They sound like kids who don’t want to be told what to do — and who are badly in need of a history lesson.
In fairness, the whole country has been in need of a proper education on this one. Until the tragedy in Charleston, most Americans seemed oblivious to the harsh truth that a third of the nation’s African-Americans lived in states in which the Confederate flag was flown from the Statehouse. And those flags, after nearly a century-long absence, reappeared again during the civil rights movement, in clear defiance of desegration.
It shouldn’t have taken a racially-motivated mass murder for there to be movement on this issue. And there are still many who seem to feel that Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof somehow commandeered the flag for his own wicked purposes, making people forget the “good things about the flag.”
Let’s be clear: This flag never represented anything good, during the Civil War or in the 150 years that have followed.
As Civil War documentarian Ken Burns observed, it is about nothing but “slavery, slavery, slavery.”
Some defenders seem to believe the flag’s historical meaning is up for grabs — a matter of personal opinion, tantamount to “Who is your favorite band?”
Wright State University history professor Paul Lockhart runs into that a lot. At a country music festival recently, a young woman told him, “the flag is my rebel spirit; it’s my heritage, it’s where I am from.”
He quipped, “I didn’t realize Auglaize County had seceded.”
It is a bit puzzling that this controversy has surfaced in Ohio and other Northern states where Union soldiers fought and died fighting their Confederate counterparts. It’s certainly not something that new Fairmont principal Tyler Alexander was anticipating on the first day of school.
He sees it not as a First Amendment issue but a school disruption issue. First and foremost, Alexander said, he’s responsible for creating a safe and productive environment for all students. He said he has had positive conversations with the students’ parents, and they have respected the restrictions against displaying the flags on school property.
So why is this happening in Northern states? It shows a strange disconnect with our own history.
“No one in their right mind would say ‘This is my heritage; here’s a swastika’ and parade it around their neighborhood,” Lockhart said.
The Confederate flag isn’t your “rebel spirit;” it is a symbol of the most evil and inhumane chapter in American history.
“It’s true that a lot of Southern men sacrificed and died for a cause they believed in,” Lockhart said. “But at the end of the day, the Confederate states seceded because they wanted to maintain the institution of slavery. The Southern states declared in articles of secession the reason for seceding was the superiority of the white man and the inferiority of the black man. So any symbol of the Confederacy honors slavery as an institution.”
And the flag’s reign of terror didn’t end with the surrender at Appomattox Court House in 1865, Lockhart said: “The Confederate flag also has a strong association with the Klan, with lynching, and with the deliberate disenfranchisement of black voters.”
I wish these Fairmont students would think about that when they leave school and snap the Confederate flag to the other side of the pickup truck, opposite the American flag.
Other students drive by, some honking encouragement, others shouting obscenities.
The boys compare detention notices like trading cards and vow not to be deterred. “I’ll take the detention, because family history is important to me,” Loyd said.
“It hurts me that I can’t fly that flag when my ancestors died for that flag,” Spicer said.
But Lockhart believes that people can honor their Southern ancestors without dishonoring the living – or the countless slaves who lived and died in shackles.
He asked, “Since when does your right to honor your ancestors come above the human necessity of showing compassion for your fellow human beings?”
Sounds like an excellent question for a high school history lesson.
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