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The South is home for me, but to my students in Minnesota, it’s an exotic place from which I am an ambassador. So when Dylann Roof massacred congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., last month and students began asking me about the killings and the debate they reignited over the Confederate flag, I did not know whether they sought my analysis as a scholar of the Confederacy and its legacies or my feelings as a transplanted Southerner. My uncertainty deepened because the questions came between semesters, from men and women who had taken courses with me last spring and would do so again in the fall. Did the timing of the questions change my relationship to the people who asked them, and therefore inform which part of me -- the professor or the person -- answered?
The difference between my answers depends on whether I want my students to embrace or reject the polemic through which we discuss the Confederacy, its cause and its symbols, ascribing them to represent either virulent hatred or regional pride and nostalgia. In a “Room for Debate” feature on June 19, The New York Times pitted former Georgia Congressman Ben Jones’s views of the flag as “A Matter of Pride and Heritage” against three authors who emphasized the flag’s postwar uses as a banner for Jim Crow violence, reactionary resistance to integration and civil rights, and the most obdurate hate groups in the contemporary United States. Governor Nikki Haley invoked a similar framing in her speech calling for the South Carolina legislature to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. The governor presented the flag’s dual meanings on an almost equal footing; which interpretation a person chose, she implied, depended on their race. For white people, the flag meant honoring the “respect, integrity and duty” of Confederate ancestors -- “That is not hate, nor is it racism,” she said of that interpretation -- while “for many others … the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.”
In asking the South Carolina legislature to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds, the governor posed the meaning of the Confederate flag as a choice, and she refused to pick sides because she understood the sympathies of those in both interpretive camps. Because many of those who honor the state’s Confederate past neither commemorate nor act out of hate, in the governor’s logic they are not wrong -- merely out of sync with the political needs of 2015.
As a person, I want my students to take sides in that polemic, to know that Confederate “heritage” is the wrong cause to celebrate in any context. I want my students to know that the Confederacy was created from states that not only embraced slavery but, as Ta-Nahisi Coates has demonstrated beyond refutation, proudly defined their political world as a violent, diabolical contest for racial mastery. I want them to understand that the Civil War rendered a verdict on secession and, in the words of historian Stephanie McCurry, on “a modern pro-slavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.”
I want them to scrutinize, as John Coski has done in his excellent book The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Symbol, the flag’s long use by those who reject equal citizenship. I want my (overwhelmingly white) students to grasp why the flags of the Confederacy in their many iterations -- on pickup trucks, college campuses and statehouse grounds -- tell African-Americans that they are not, and cannot be, equal citizens. I want them to feel the imperative in the words of President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, in which the president claimed that only by rejecting the shared wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow and the denial of civil rights can we strive for “an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”
As a historian, I want more. I don’t want my students to simply choose sides in a polemic between heritage and hate; rather, I hope they will interrogate the Confederacy’s white supremacist project on more complex terms. A simple dichotomy of heritage or hate misses something essential about both the Confederacy and the social construction of racism: then as now, you don’t need to hate to be a racist. Many Confederate soldiers held views that cohered perfectly with the reactionary, violent and indeed hateful lens through which Dylann Roof sees race. After the Battle of Petersburg, Major Rufus Barrier celebrated the “slaughter … in earnest” of black soldiers and relished how “the blood ran in streams from their worthless carcasses.”
But others, like Confederate officer Francis Marion Parker, grounded their commitment to white supremacy not in jagged words of hate, but in the softer tones of family. Explaining his reasons for going to war in a letter to his wife and children, Parker promised that “home will be so sweet, when our difficulties are settled and we are permitted to return to the bosom of our families, to enjoy our rights and privileges” -- that is, slaveholding -- “under the glorious flag of the Confederacy.”
I want my students to see that men and women of differing temperaments and qualities supported the Confederacy’s white supremacist project and justified their support through a variety of ethics, appeals and emotions. I want them to overcome rhetorical paradigms that allow modern-day defenders of Confederate heritage to divorce the character of the men who fought for the “Lost Cause” from the cause itself. I want them to think critically about how otherwise honorable, courageous men as well as vicious, hate-filled racists came to embrace a cause informed, in the words of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, by “the great truth that the Negro is not the equal of the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
I hope my students will draw a bit from both of my answers, bringing careful scrutiny of the past into dialogue with the urgency of the present. As they do so, I hope they will think a bit about what historical meaning is and why history demands their scrutiny. If history becomes a mere servant of contemporary “truthiness,” reduced to selective anecdotes deployed as weapons in polarizing debates, then we are merely choosing camps in a contest of identities. Such one-dimensional choices leave space for those who equate the Confederacy with nostalgia and a kind of inherited pride to use the Confederate flag as shorthand for who they are and where they come from without any mention of race or white supremacy. Yet if historical interpretation remains antiquarian and refuses to speak to the present, it leaves us self-satisfied in the illusion that we have transcended the people and societies we study. One day generations yet unborn will scrutinize us and find us wanting, too. If we critique the people of the past and the choices they made not only with an eye to distancing ourselves from their worst extremes but also with a sense of how easy, how normal and how justifiable unequal citizenship can appear to be, the tragedy in Charleston and the history it invokes may teach a resonant lesson.
