Freedom Riders Quotes

“[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