Confederate Flag Quotes

“Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn’t know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“I refuse to believe that Southern pride stems from the pain we’ve inflicted on others. Southern pride comes from what we’ve built together. In our music and art and innovation.

In the people who honor us by taking our culture out into the world and celebrating it. It comes from people seeking us out, and flocking here to experience all that we know and love.

We are all neighbors. We are all Southerners. This is OUR culture, and it means what WE choose it to mean.

So, yes. I’ll say it again—Southern Pride is good collard greens.

Death to the flag.

Long live the South.”
― Jason Latour, Southern Bastards #3

“The South lost ... and that is good ... and that hateful flag needs to come down ... and reparations need to be offered and if none of that can happen ... well ... let there be poetry”
― Nikki Giovanni, Acolytes

“In the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights activism and new federal laws inspired the same resistance to racial progress and once again led to a spike in the use of Confederate imagery. In fact, it was in the 1950s, after racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, that many Southern states erected Confederate flags atop their state government buildings.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The Country Sonnet

I stand beneath the southern sky,
Looking up at the heavenly bodies.
The twinkling stars know no color,
Then why we mortals beneath act so puny!
Country means heart, country means humility,
All that is pure is born in the country.
How could we poison its innocent soul,
By our savage escapades of bigotry!
It's high time we be the example of kindness,
For the streams of Mississippi carry acceptance.
Behold ye all blind with confederate pride,
Conscience rises above the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Let's resuscitate the country with love and passion.
We'll turn this land into a cradle of amalgamation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society

“I understood slavery as bad and I had a vague sense that it had once been integral to the country and that the dispute over it had somehow contributed to the civil war. But even that partial sense ran contrary to the way the civil war was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honorable dual between wayward brothers instead of what it was. A spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Africans were brought chained to American shores. When it comes to the civil war, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments, are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature, or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerged from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which seven hundred fifty thousand American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers kill in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding African slavery. That war was inaugurated, not reluctantly, but lustily by men who believe property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of god, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done the now defeated god lived on honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist programs. The history breaks the myth. And so, the history is ignored and fictions are weaved in to our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom, and transform banditry into chivalry. And so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“The Confederate flag stopped flying as the pennant of reconciliation, the joining of the southern military tradition to northern establishment might to spread Americanism abroad. It now was the banner of those who felt that the establishment had sacrificed that tradition, "stabbed it in the back." The battle flag became the banner not of a specific Lost Cause but of all of white supremacy's lost causes.”
― Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

“A person wearing a hijab is more likely to be suspected as a terrorist than a person carrying a confederate flag, yet it is the confederate flag that poses a threat to society as a symbol of white supremacy, not the hijab.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“The confederate flag, for example, will never stand for heritage for black folks. It still awakens fear in the minds and imaginations of elder black folks for whom it signaled the support of white racist assault on blackness”
― Bell Hooks

“Monarchy is the british equivalent of the confederacy. Those who identify with it, can't live without it, but those who are humans, know the inhumanity it represents.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“We drove down the highway, past shabby farmsteads with flaking paintwork and rotting wood, past tumbling-down tobacco barns cut through with shards of sunlight. Past abandoned cars and rusting farm machinery, and black cattle standing in paddocks next to farmhouses. Past towns that seemed half-abandoned, with boarded-up shops and houses with Confederate flags in their windows and 'VOTE TRUMP' signs on the front lawn. Shutters were closed and leaves gathered on the porch; churches with billboards promised redemption for drug addicts. Flakes of snow fell but didn't settle.

Our friend drove us around the country in his white pick-up truch with his sheepdog in the back and hisred toolbox and wrenches in the footwell. He told us about his people, past and present, and introduced us to farmers who were holding on. They all told us the same thing: America had chosen industrial farming and abandoned its small family farms, and this was the result - a landscape and a community that was falling apart. They showed us fields of oilseed rape that were full of weeds because they were now resistant to the herbicides that had been overused. They spoke of mountains ripped open for minerals, and rivers polluted, the farming people leaving the land or holding on in hidden poverty. And the worse it got, the more people seemed to gravitate to charlatans with their grand promises and ready-made scapegoats to focus all their anger on.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“As the meeting got underway, the twenty or so men in the room pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Then the color sergeant unfurled the rebel battle flag. "I salute the Confederate flag with affection, reverence and undying affection to the Cause for which it stands," the men said, effectively contradicting the pledge they'd just made to "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“The waitress came over to refill my coffee. She'd served the CCC at breakfast and formed her own views about the [South Carolina capitol Confederate] flag dispute. "You know what the state should'a done? Send someone to the capitol in the dead of night to take the flag down without telling anyone. I'd bet a week's worth of tips that not a single person in South Carolina would'a noticed it was gone." She sighed. "It's too late now. As soon as you make an issue of something, everyone feels they got to pick sides, same as they done back in eighteen-whatever.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“There wasn't much that Walt did trust about the State--or "the Snake," as he called it. That was why he'd taken a day off work, without pay, to demonstrate for the rebel flag. "I'm not an American, I'm a citizen of the Confederate States of America, which has been under military occupation for the past hundred thirty years.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Chapman was a tiny woman with oversized glasses and an electric-green pants suit. Her words were equally arresting. As soon as I sat down, she showed me a newspaper story quoting her recent comments on a local radio show. "Slavery was not all that bad," she'd declared. "A lot of people were quite happy to be living on large plantations."

Chapman smiled sweetly. "Blacks just need to get over slavery," she said, as though talking of the flu. "You can't live in the past."

I gently observed that she herself might be accused of living in the past by defending the rebel flag. "Oh, no, that's about now," she said. "Blacks don't really have anything against the flag. They just don't want us to have it. They want the best jobs, the biggest money. Now they want this. If we lose the mascot, it'll just be a matter of time before we lose everything." Her voice quivered with rage. Don't put us where they used to be."

It was the same bitterness I'd heard from Bud Sharpe, the pro-flag demonstrator in Columbia. For both Sharpe and Chapman, the rebel banner represented a finger in the dike, the last brake against a noisome tide of minority rights that was fast eroding the status of whites.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“We're a little ol' Southern Mayberry," Guthrie's mayor told me. "Or I thought we were." A portly man of thirty-six, he'd campaigned for mayor of the town of 1,600 with the slogan "I'm a good guy and will work hard for you." I found him fastidiously sweeping Guthrie's diminutive town hall. "When I was a boy, no one cared about that [Confederate] flag," he went on. "Heck, I never even thought of myself as Southern. But today there's this intolerance, white and black. People feel they have to wave their beliefs in each other's faces.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“[Shelby] Foote's views on the Confederate battle flag were equally nuanced. In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong. The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. "It stood for law, honor, love of country," Foote said, and the banner was revered as such by the veterans who had fought under it.

At the same time, Foote recognized that the flag had become "a banner of shame and disgrace and hate." But he pinned the blame for this on educated Southerners who allowed white supremacists to misuse the flag during the civil rights struggle. “Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War