Rebel Flag Quotes

“...Ward felt the tale carried a redeeming message. "What were they putting up monuments to in the first place? A lot of Southerners dying for nothing. And look at us now, still arguing about the rebel flag. To me, that says we're still a lost cause in a lot of ways." She dumped an armful of old documents in the canoe and turned off the lights. "Maybe the message of the whole mix-up is that we shouldn't make such a fuss about these old symbols. Forget it. There's real things to worry about.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Bud Sharpe was a fifty-five-year-old construction foreman....

"I feel like the [rebel] flag's the only thing working people like me have left," he went on. "All my life it's been one thing after another. First they integrated the schools. Then they integrated everything. Then they say 'colored' ain't right anymore, it's got to be 'black,' then 'African-American.' But nothing changes for us. We're still 'crackers' and 'peckerwoods' and 'rednecks.' I feel like I've swallowed enough for one lifetime.”
― 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

“No matter how many Northerners flocked to Atlanta, an essential Southernness would endure. "We have an extra layer of armor. Our culture."

Collins's armor deflected every arrow I tried to fling at his arguments. The heritage movement wasn't backward-looking, he said; it was tuned precisely to the times. "We're anti-federal. Con-federal, if you like. I'd rather that Georgia not get one federal dollar." He believed this same independent streak had sparked the Civil War, which in his view was fought over economic issues and constitutional sovereignty. "If all the South wanted to do was to maintain slavery, the easiest way was to stay in the Union, where slavery was legal." Nor did the rebel flag symbolize the oppression of blacks; after all, the Stars and Stripes flew over slavery for eighty years, which the battle flag of the South never did. "The Confederacy was an attempt to institute a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Period.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War