Saturday night Leah and I went down into town to get hamburgers, a very rare occurrence for us. We had forgotten that it was the Fourth of July until we drove past Ridge Ferry Park on the Oostanaula River and saw crowds and police gathering. The hamburger joint was nearby. When we pulled into the parking lot, we saw this parade heading towards the park to celebrate American independence.

Leah and I both had the same strong emotional reaction to this sight: it was scary.

I have tried to be fair and honest about this, but I can’t think of one even slightly charitable interpretation of this behavior. For me, it’s one of two things, either a display that says, “I’m a racist and proud of it”, or a display of gross ignorance; possibly both.

All of the flags in this image seem to be the Confederate battle flag. Some trucks had the old Georgia state flag that included the battle flag, and some had an American flag alongside the racist flag.

The old Georgia state flag with the Confederate battle flag is an even stronger statement of racism than the original battle flag itself, since the Georgia legislature created that particular flag in 1956 specifically as a symbol of defiance towards the American policy of desegregation. The racist symbol flag was eliminated in 2003 through the efforts of Roy Barnes, the last Democratic governor of Georgia, who lost his next gubernatorial election largely because of that.

I interpret this parade of bigotry as a reaction to the widespread backlash against display of the Confederate symbol after the racially-motivated murder of nine black people in Charleston. Apparently other like-minded (I’m being generous in attributing a quality of “mind” to this behavior) people have been having such parades around Georgia and perhaps other backward places.

I talked about the kinds of people who do this in a previous post about the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the racist auto tag they had the state of Georgia produce. There is sometimes an attempt to characterize the symbol and the behavior as honoring some kind of mythical Southern heritage that doesn’t include starting the bloodiest American war to try to preserve and extend slavery in the United States. In that previous post I concluded that the SCV are being disingenuous and that their other words show their true colors.

Maybe some of these people are trying to say that they simply want to honor their Southern heritage. In that case, it’s kind of ironic that they are heading towards Ridge Ferry Park, named for the Cherokee leader Major Ridge, who had a ferry not far away. Ridge was a Cherokee leader during the time that the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their traditional lands in Georgia by covetous white settlers. That’s certainly part of Southern white heritage, but not one I would consider worth honoring.

Another part of Southern heritage is a tendency to cry about how badly Southerners were treated after the Civil War (or, as I prefer to call it, the War to Save Slavery). Roger Aycock, a local author, wrote a history of the Rome, Ga, area called “All Roads to Rome.” He relied largely on contemporaneous newspaper articles for his material. The history of Reconstruction was notable for the whining of Romans about how badly they were treated after losing the war, but there was nothing about how badly slaves might have been treated before, or ex-slaves after. That kind of blind, self-absorbed unhappiness about conditions created by their own behavior seems to continue to this day to be typical of a certain population down here.

In any event, everyone knows that the Southern heritage they want to celebrate and honor never existed, and “everyone” includes the flag bearers of that heritage.

The other possibility is that these people really are simply racists and they know exactly what they’re doing, and they want people to have the reaction that Leah and I had. They want black people to fear them and what they might do. If it scares a few white “liberals”, so much the better.

I suppose one possible good thing about the display of the Confederate battle flag is that these people are identifying themselves so the rest of us know who they are.

* This opinionated post is one of the very few I have allowed myself on this blog. We now return to the normal bland posts.