Pro-Confederate flag rally at 'south's Mount Rushmore' draws hundreds
Amid opposition to flag following Charleston shootings, protesters at Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park say their celebration is about ‘southern heritage’
In a flare-up of the controversy that followed a June mass shooting in South Carolina, hundreds of protesters waving Confederate flags gathered this weekend in Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park.
The park is home to the huge Confederate Memorial Carving, a southern Mount Rushmore that features Confederate president Jefferson Davis, General Robert E Lee and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
An uncomfortable tolerance of the Confederate flag in mainstream society was upended in June when photos circulated on the internet revealing that Dylann Roof, a young white racist who is charged with killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, had posed with the Confederate symbol. Roof also burned a US flag.
Many Americans assumed the Confederate flag was retired for good after governors in South Carolina and Alabama removed it from their statehouses following the Charleston shooting, and presidential candidates from both parties declared it too divisive for official display.
But John Russell Houser – who shot 11 people, two fatally, before killing himself in a Louisiana movie theater in July – flew a large Confederate flag outside his home, and hung a Nazi swastika banner outside a bar he owned in Georgia.
Many people still fly the Confederate banner, and not just in the south. Some who display it are motivated by pride in their ancestry or enthusiasm for southern history. Others see it as a symbol of their right to challenge to authority in general, and the federal government in particular. And some have hoisted Confederate flags in recent weeks precisely because the flag is generating controversy again.
“You can’t take it out on the flag – the flag had nothing to do with it,” said Ralph Chronister, who felt inspired to dig out his old Confederate flag, which is decorated with a bald eagle, and hang it from his weather-beaten front porch on a heavily travelled street in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
“I’ve got nothing against black people; I’ve got nothing against anyone else,” said Chronister, 46, who was raised in Maryland. “I’m just very proud of my southern heritage. That’s why I fly it.”
Many politicians echoed South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, in calls to remove the Confederate flag after the Charleston killings, describing it as a relic that belongs in museums but not on official display. Haley called it “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past”. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said “it shouldn’t fly anywhere”.
But the flags aren’t hard to find in places like Hanover, Pennsylvania, a factory and farm community about six miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line that saw action during the civil war’s Gettysburg campaign.
One flies from a pole on the main road into town, by a National Rifle Association banner. Another was hung from a second-floor apartment, directly above a daycare downstairs.
Jeremy Gouge, a 44-year-old roofer, said family ties to the south were why he proudly flies a Confederate battle flag on a pole in his front yard, on a quiet residential street not far from Chronister’s home.
“I know there’s things that happened to slaves and things. I can’t control what other people have done,” Gouge said. “What’s the next flag that someone is going to say: ‘We don’t like that flag – let’s take that one down?’”
It’s hardly the only place where Confederate flags fly in northern states. Hannah Alberstadt said she was surprised to see many of them in her hometown of Girard in northwestern Pennsylvania.
“My town has always had sort of a hick-ish contingent, but it’s like every other day I see another Confederate flag, and it’s just shocking,” she said. “These people are definitely trying to make a statement, because people have them waving from their truck beds, people have them on a stick in their front yards, people are wearing them to the grocery store.”
The symbol still raises ire: a flag on the back of a pickup truck parked in a convenience store lot in the middle of Hanover was set on fire. And in Elk Grove, California, a Confederate flag was displayed at a gun shop until the owners removed it in late June after getting death threats.
But Georgia’s rally wasn’t the only protest to support the flag.
No comments:
Post a Comment