Word: rebel
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...rural South, old ideas die hard. And progress has made loyalists more militant about holding onto their idea of Dixie: its history and heritage, its family and sovereignty, its thumb in the eye of Northern culture and, for some, its codes of racial superiority and subjugation. The culture of rebel remembrance was captured in Confederates in the Attic, a 1998 best seller by journalist Tony Horwitz that chronicled the fanatical popularity of battlefield re-enactments and the marketing of the war to tourists and hobbyists. But since his book appeared, the arguments about the Confederacy and its symbols have only...
Last week Mississippians voted 2 to 1 to retain a state flag dominated by the rebel emblem--the last one in the South, since Georgia redesigned its flag Jan. 30. A coalition of business and civil rights leaders spent close to $700,000 arguing that the old flag insults African Americans and repels investment, but only 18 of Mississippi's 82 counties voted to change it. The reformers concluded that people just need more time to get where they're going...
South Carolina last year removed the Confederate flag from atop the state capitol, but the N.A.A.C.P. still boycotts the state because the flag now flies elsewhere on the capitol grounds. Last month in Virginia, when Governor Jim Gilmore replaced the old, pro-rebel state proclamation of Confederate History Month with a new one honoring "all Virginians who served in the Civil War," the Sons of Confederate Veterans condemned him for "honoring people who...murdered, raped and pillaged." In Selma, Ala., a battleground in the 1960s civil rights movement, whites are militant in defense of a new statue of Confederate hero...
...Culture at the University of Mississippi. "Southern white ministers were the center of a kind of civil religion that sacralized the Confederacy after the war was over to help keep it alive, so they made Robert E. Lee into a saint and Stonewall Jackson into a martyr." Outposts of rebel theology can still be found. At the Confederate Presbyterian Church in Wiggins, Miss., parishioners enter the chapel by passing through a room lined with framed photographs of Generals Lee, Forrest and Jackson. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Pastor John Thomas Cripps, a member of a white supremacist organization...
...long since moved on. "The real ideology of the contemporary South is economic development, not the Confederacy," Wilson says. But for "an intensely committed ideological group," the right-wing politics of the '80s and '90s--smaller government, state's rights, the racially charged dismantling of welfare--echoes the old rebel yell. And for poor whites who missed the boat in the New Economy, flags and monuments to heroes may, he says, "be a kind of last stand...