It’s time to put away outdated symbols like the Confederate flag — and for good
In the pivotal 1948 presidential election, then-SC Gov. Strom Thurmond campaigned against President Harry Truman’s civil rights program.
At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Thurmond told a receptive audience that measures against lynching and racial discrimination “would undermine the American way of life and outrage the Bill of Rights.”
In July of that year, Thurmond left the Democratic Party at its national convention in July and established the States Rights Democratic Party, known as the Dixiecrats.
While accepting the Dixiecrats’ presidential nomination in Birmingham, Ala., Thurmond declared that “there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the (N-word) race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, into our churches.”
Thurmond went on to capture only four states — including our state — in the 1948 election, which Truman famously won in come-from-behind fashion over Republican candidate Thomas Dewey.
But Thurmond did go on to represent South Carolina for nearly 50 years n the U.S. Senate as a member of the Republican Party.
Change has come
In his 2018 book “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” Jon Meacham used the 1948 campaign as an illustration of Americans’ better angels prevailing in conflicts “between the impulses of good and evil.” Fortunately, the attitudes of South Carolinians are vastly different in 2020 than they were in 1948 — and they are continuing to change and evolve.
People who were inclined to be silent are now speaking up about issues, including the need to reform law enforcement to ensure that people of color are treated the same as white citizens.
The tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis two months ago triggered a global response, including peaceful protest parades in Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach.
The response suggests there is a fundamental change taking place in attitudes and feelings about relationships with people who may not look like us, about concerns for de facto equality and about the need to truly have justice for all.
In recent weeks alone:
▪ Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves removed the Confederate emblem from the state flag.
▪ NASCAR banned Confederate flags from being displayed at its race tracks.
▪ Statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and other figures linked to the Confederacy were removed or approved for removal from public places.
The majority of these monuments were removed by government action. Unfortunately, however, a few have been taken down by protesters — which works against their cause just as arson and looting diminish the impact of peaceful protests.
Better angels
Once the Civil War ended, both Lee and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, felt the Confederate flag should be put away. Lee urged his troops “to commit to oblivion the feelings” that the Confederate flag engendered; Davis, meanwhile, wrote that the flag should be folded up, laid away and no longer used.
Claims of Southern heritage notwithstanding, the Confederate battle flag was fully usurped by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups and individuals — and in reality it now represents a symbol of hate and domestic terrorism.
Truman warned against dividing the country into sections, and the need “to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones.” Those best instincts are what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
May they again prevail.
This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 4:44 AM.