An artifact of the past

Of course you may fly the Confederate flag over your state Capitol or wherever else you choose in honor of your history and heritage.

It's a free country for everybody, whether North or South, thanks to your precious Confederacy losing the war.


Be advised, though, that the history you honor is one of evil enslavement on account of a skin color widely represented in your state's contemporary population. That is to say you may rub dark faces in that rebel flag if that's what you want.

That history also is one of armed and murderous and failed revolution against the free country you now like to call, without any sense of irony, the greatest in the world.

And be advised that the heritage you honor is one of Jim Crow laws and segregated schools and polarized neighborhoods and corrosive economic inequity perpetuated by cycles of poverty and cultural deprivation.

So fly the rebel battle flag high. Stick it on your pickup. Drape it in your window. If that's what you want to do. If that's what you honor. If that's what you celebrate. If that's who you are.

In a way, you're doing the reasonable rest of us a favor by identifying your primitive selves.

But since the country is gloriously united, free for everyone both North and South, please allow me to celebrate our precious liberties by using freedom of press and expression to assert just a few things:

• The North had the moral high ground in 1861-65.

• The North won fair and square.

• Lincoln trumps Lee.

• No amount of intersectional success by neo-Confederate football teams loosely associated with higher education can ever change any of that.

• You can rise from shame, and many of us try, but it helps to admit it first.

So the post-murder news from Charleston has been about the debate over the high-flying Confederate flag at the South Carolina state Capitol in Columbia. The Republican governor came out last week, at long last, for taking it down.

But some Republican presidential pretenders--our boy Mike Huckabee among them--have evaded taking a stand. They have said, essentially, that honoring hatred and shame is a state's right, not one for outside agitators.

Huckabee said he was running for president of all states, not governor of South Carolina, though, actually, his chances would seem better in the latter case.

He told Meet the Press that if someone came to Arkansas and tried to tell us to take down our state flag--though, actually, he lives in Florida--we'd tell him where to stick the pole.

Huckabee seems to have a fixation--rhetorical, at least--on that place where he was recommending doing the sticking.

As it happens, some people decided last week to make an issue, or try to make an issue, of Bill and Hillary Clinton's once having resided in an Arkansas that has a state flag with four strange stars in the middle of other diamond-forming stars. One of those strange stars in the middle was added in the early 20th Century to recognize the Confederacy. And that recognition was re-codified by a 1987 bill that Bill Clinton himself signed.

That's silly.

Ours is a strange star in a flag of too-many stars. It doesn't scream Confederacy. It hardly whispers it.

I go to or through the state Capitol grounds frequently. And the display I see getting the most visitor action is John Deering's sculpture of the nine brave black children who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

So let me rise in defense of my beloved Arkansas.

We have more than our share of shame on matters of race and evil history and sad lingering heritage.

But we have done far better than South Carolina and certain other jurisdictions in minimizing our anachronistic celebration of that evil, and instead rising to celebrate our efforts to overcome it, arduous and uneven though they have been.

States can be redeemed. We're working on that in Arkansas. Why, just on Tuesday, the Fort Smith School Board voted to phase out the Rebel mascot for Southside High School.

Now it looks like South Carolina has decided to work on it too.

But redemption must be earned, and some of our folks make the work harder.

They're the ones saying we must honor our history. But they misuse the language. Honor is not the right verb. Understand and overcome--those are the right verbs.

Perhaps we shall understand someday. Perhaps we shall overcome someday.

Put the Confederate cloth inside an expertly preserving museum--far from official places and soaring public heights--and keep it there forever.

I hereby grant permission to museum curators to attach this column to the exhibit.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/25/2015

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