The right flag decision

Sadly, the divisive Confederate flag issue is raising its ugly head again in our community. A lot of Southern heritage lovers are upset with Mayor Bob Young's order to take the flag down from the Riverwalk Augusta flag display. As a number of our letters to the editor indicate, the heritage people feel betrayed and hurt at the flag's removal.

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This newspaper bows to no one in regard to respecting the virtues and verities of the Old South, but obviously there are negatives there too. And it's the negatives to which the mayor was responding when he ordered the flag's take-down.

He didn't remove it just because local NAACP leader Charles Smith asked him to, though the request did prompt Young to consult with others before making his decision. City commissioners of both races, and leaders in the business and hospitality communities, all agreed it should go. It was a local decision made by local leaders, not just the mayor.

And they're right, especially with South Carolina's NAACP holding its annual convention in Augusta next month precisely because the civil rights organization is boycotting its own state for prominently displaying the Confederate flag on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.

Whether one agrees with the South Carolina boycott is not the point. The point is, Augustans should not welcome conventioneers to our community and then display symbols that offend them. The Confederate flag flying prominently on the Riverwalk would surely offend South Carolina's NAACP. So why insult them?

Whether the heritage people like it or not, more than just the NAACP takes offense at the Confederate flag. It offends other citizens too, and not all of them are black. Some are white.

Flaggers, as the flag's defenders are known, didn't defend their flag until African-Americans began to criticize it. By then it was too late; they should have sprung to the flag's defense when racist groups like the KKK began appropriating it for their own propaganda use.

Why keep flying a symbol that large numbers of Americans dislike? Symbols should unite people, not divide them. Besides, the Confederate flag is only being removed from a Riverwalk display, not from Dixie history. Confederate flags that were actually a part of the War Between the States will continue to fly at the Augusta Museum of History. No one's suggesting they be taken down.

The richness of Confederate history does not depend on a piece of cloth waving in the wind. Nor should anyone be as offended at the absence of such a controversial symbol as opponents are at its presence.

--From the Friday, September 24, 2004 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle