Word: flagging
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Mississippi Blacks and whites grapple with the rebel-flag issue...
...know more black people than you do," William Earl Faggert is telling me in the office of the Heidelberg Academy, a private southeastern Mississippi school where he is headmaster. We are sitting in his office--or is it a Confederate museum? It has more than a dozen rebel flags, a portrait of Jefferson Davis, a beautifully bound Bible. His shirt pocket is stitched with a Confederate symbol and the words WAVE THE FLAG. I wonder how he could possibly determine which of us knows more black people...
...longtime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Faggert helped gather 212,000 signatures in favor of the successful effort to leave the rebel symbol on the state flag. The flag has flown since 1894. (In other Southern states, the Confederate symbol wasn't raised until after federal antisegregation legislation was enacted in the 1960s, a fact that routs the "history-and-heritage" argument the way Grant routed Lee.) Faggert tells me that anyone who understands history respects the flag and rejects the notion that it is a sign of slavery or hatred. It was under that flag that...
...black guy I know is named Dolphus Weary, and it should come as no shock that Weary sees the flag issue differently from how Faggert does. Weary was on the committee that recommended the removal of the Confederate symbol, and I meet him in his downtown Jackson office, across from the Governor's mansion, where the flag flies, to find out why. "I've invited a white friend to join us," Weary tells me as I arrive. "I just want you to hear his side of this...
...love that flag, and I love my heritage," says Paris, who doesn't defend slavery but argues it was accepted in both the South and the North, and "Old Glory flew over slavery as well." To Paris, the rebel flag was not a symbol of slavery or hatred. Especially not after he went to Ole Miss and waved it at football games...