An excerpt from the New Republic - (Bold is mine)
The Confederate Flag Is a Racist Symbol. Just Ask the KKK.
According to both Cunningham and Hague, in the ’50s and ’60s the flag began to fly over statehouses and city halls in the south, and was embedded in state flags and other official state symbols. But the flag also began to appear in far more disturbing places: Klan rallies. At the time of the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, who was killed just after the Selma to Montgomery march, there were Klan rallies of anywhere from 500 to 5,000 people happening somewhere in the South almost every single night, says David Cunningham. In a small town in North Carolina, the Klan celebrated three of Liuzzo’s murderers; there’s footage. Cunningham describes the rally as even “mainstream white southerners wildly cheering this murder… [And] very front and center is the waving of Confederate flags.” He continues. “It would be difficult to find any public presence of the Klan during that period that didn’t feature multiple Confederate flags.”
“There is a particular brand of southern life where the flag is used most pronouncedly,” says Cunningham. “We see the remobilization of the flag during the most pronounced defiance to civil rights... It gets brought out most strongly in times when white supremacy is attacked most directly.”
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that a bitter battle over the Confederate flag has followed a year of scrutiny of police violence against unarmed black men, a fresh wave of civil rights activism and legislation, and the rise of #BlackLivesMatter and the movement it symbolizes. And it’s just as predictable that the KKK would rally around the Confederate flag on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds in the midst of a push to take it down. This isn’t about rallying for the Confederate flag, it's about rallying for what the flag represents for the Klan, which is what it represented for Charleston shooter Dylan Roof. In rallying around the flag, the Ku Klux Klan will be rallying around Roof, a man who murdered nine black Americans for being black. He committed exactly the kind of senseless, racist violence the group has always celebrated. The Confederate flag just happens to be one of their symbols.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122216/confederate-flag-still-flying-today-because-kkk
No comments:
Post a Comment