1 Boring Old Man

I suppose most Southerners have something to say about  the goings on after the Charleston shooting and all the media attention about the battle flag. As a boy growing up in Chattanooga Tennessee literally in an area peppered with cannons and Civil War Monuments, I had no idea that the Civil War was even about slavery. That seems as outrageous to my to say as it must be to read. When I hear other people say things like that, I hear it as possibly reconstructing history, but for me to say otherwise would be a lie. My Dad was from an Italian immigrant family; grew up in a Northern coal mining town on the wrong side of prejudice; and came South on a football scholarship. My mother was from rural Georgia – a vaudeville family – and a soft spoken do-gooder somewhere to the left of anyone else in Tennessee I ever met. We were raised to sit in the back of the bus and go out of our way to be respectful to black people. It was odd, because I never met anyone else that said that, But for that matter, I can’t recall anyone actually talking about segregation much in those times. It was just part of the fabric of life. And it was disconnected from the stories of chivalry and honor – and that flag.

Back in the summer of 66, my young wife and I took a camping trip down the Mississippi Delta from Memphis where I was finishing Medical School. We wanted to take some Jim Crow pictures to preserve what it had been like there – thinking that we were finally on the downhill leg of the Civil Rights Movement, and people might try to forget. In the course of our travels, we saw a sign to Ruleville Mississippi – a place we’d heard of from watching the Democratic Convention when the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party tried to be seated. Their most eloquent spokesperson was Fannie Lou Hamer from Ruleville, a tiny town in the heart of the cotton fields that covered the Delta in those days. [Notice that President Johnson cut her off of national television during her speech]:

As we drove into town, we knew we were in the right place for our photographs. There was a Dairy Queen on the way into town with a strange addition built onto the front of it with a large picture window. On the back wall was a huge Confederate Battle Flag tacked up on the wall. The sign outside said, White Citizens Council Annex, Private Club. So we drove through town, photographing the "white" and "colored" signs that had defined the segregated South of our childhood. My wife was driving as I clicked away. She circled back, determined to get a picture of the White Citizens Council Dairy Queen. We parked nearby, but I noticed that the same two-tone blue 1956 Ford that had been following us earlier pulled up right behind. I also notice that there was a shotgun mounted vertically between the two guys in the front seat.

So we drove on, forgoing our photo-op, followed by the two-tone blue Ford. When we reached the Sunflower County Line, it mercifully turned around. When we finally stopped for gas and gathered some composure, we started wondering how they knew we were "foreigners." There, on the rear bumper of my car was the answer – a black and white A.C.L.U. bumper sticker that simply said, "JUSTICE." Our pictures didn’t survive the 50 years in between, but the memories did.

In the mid-1980s, my teenaged daughter and a friend announced that they were going to "a march." They’d heard us and our friends tell our epic tales of our marching days, and decided they wanted to get in on the action. There was a poor rural county north of Atlanta, all white, that was "racist." A school teacher had organized a small MLK day parade, that had been broken up by "the Klan." The next week, Hosea Williams, a local Civil Rights leader took a bus filled with students from the Black Atlanta colleges, and the same thing happened. So he got serious, and mobilized a big march. Meet at the King Center and ride buses up to this town. So the four of us showed up along with 20,000+ other Atlantans. They finally got all the City buses there and every church bus in town, and off we went. There were more marchers than people in that whole county. The comic relief was this armada of buses stopping on the Interstate for a 20,000 person strong pee break. Men on the port side at the fence, women in the woods on the starboard side. The county was overwhelmed by the invading horde [now a bustling suburb with McMansions in what used to be those empty fields].

But the point is that back then, the sides of the highway were lined with people, mouths agape, some of whom had denim jackets with Klan logos, waving those battle flags and throwing snowballs from what was left of a rare Georgia snowstorm. When we got back to the buses, we were among a few hundred people that didn’t get on a bus. By then, it was night, and we were gathered on an overpass. And here came the pickup trucks with battle flags mounted on the beds and people leaning out the windows twirling chains and hurling epithets. They had been soundly defeated and they were plenty mad. After about 45 very long minutes [during which I questioned my parental judgement], the State Troopers discovered us and herded us into a parking lot, calling for more buses. As fate would have it, our bus broke down as we got off  the Interstate in Atlanta, and we had to walk the full length of "Sweet Auburn Avenue" – the heart of the black Atlanta "club scene" with two very cute blond teens who were quite the objects of interest on this particular Saturday night. A memorable day – snowballs early and cat-calls late. But if I had any remaining romantic attachments to that flag, 45 minutes on that overpass put an end to them for good.

In 2001, then Georgia Governor Roy Barnes changed the Georgia flag, a leftover from segregationist days. It actually probably cost him being re-elected [now I read our "new flag" was a confederate flag too. Who knew?]. But whatever, I feel kind of proud that the Southern States are moving towards finally removing those anachronistic symbols. Whatever they meant, or now mean, we can do without them: