Univ. Of Fla. Professor: South Is A House Divided Over Southern Symbols

March 8, 2001

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new guard has taken over in the Old South, leaving the region a house divided over public displays of the Confederate flag and other Southern symbols, says a University of Florida researcher and editor of a new book on the subject.

“One reason why the symbols of the Confederacy and slavery have become particularly problematical to some residents of the South is that the South has changed drastically during the last 50 years,” said W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a UF history professor. “The number of non-white Southerners who are now citizens and have become enfranchised has grown dramatically.”

The use of public space to celebrate the Confederacy was never debated among the political elites who ran the South in the days of segregation, said Brundage, editor of the new book “Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory and Southern Identity.”

“In 1935, if a small community wanted to put up a Confederate monument funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a public square, who exactly was going to be in a position to stop them?” he said. “By contrast, in the 1990s, when Virginia Gov. Gilmore declared Confederate History Month, there were a variety of groups, white and black, who were not willing to tolerate it without some sort of protest.”

More recently, controversy and sometimes violence have erupted over how the Southern past is recalled, the most notorious involving the flying of the Confederate flag outside the South Carolina state capitol, Brundage said.

Other disputes include the removal of George Washington’s name from a black school in a New Orleans neighborhood because he was a slave owner and a dispute over hanging a banner portrait of Robert E. Lee on a Richmond, Va., canal walk.

“The Civil War left some deep scars, and there are certain predictable flashpoints in Southern memory relating to the war, slavery and secession,” he said.

The growing diversity of the South has emboldened groups that were marginalized in the past, most notably blacks who now demand a more inclusive public culture, one that acknowledges their history as well, Brundage said.

At the same time, proponents of Southern nationalism and the Confederate tradition believe they defend part of an embattled culture that they are being robbed of, he said.

In many ways, the debates being waged over the South’s past are variations of those taking place all over the country, Brundage said. Such recent cultural conflicts include the controversy over an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution dealing with the Enola Gay atomic bombing of Japan, as well as the Washington, D.C., art show that offended some groups by using the themes of genocide and invasion against American Indians to interpret the settlement of the American West, he said.

Often, he said, people are looking for dependable, fixed sources of allegiance or identity.

“Confederate traditionalists projecting back into the past an idealized version of the Confederacy give some of these people a sense of a secure anchor in an age where there are lots of reasons to feel unsettled or insecure about American culture,” he said.

Whites who are descendants of Confederate soldiers view the Civil War as a heroic lost cause, where Southerners honorably went off to a battle that was unwinnable, Brundage said. Blacks, on the other hand, recall the Civil War as the crucial moment in securing their freedom, the prevailing of justice after two centuries of slavery, he said.

Defenders of a particular tradition are always eager to suggest somehow that their belief is timeless, organic or natural; that because something has always been one way it should remain that way, he said.

“The collection of essays in this book is intended to remind people that that’s not how public culture or historical memory works,” he said. “Somebody had to make it what it is. Memory — how we view the past — is something we can change.”