Thoughts On Displaying Your Southern Heritage.

On the subject of Southern heritage, someone asked me if displaying the Confederate flag offended me. I said very much so. But it does have historical importance, if that's what you're claiming. But in that case you can keep in your drawer. Like Marge Schott told everyone she was just doing with that swastika.

 

The Confederate flag is a symbol of hatred, oppression, and white supremacy. The Confederates themselves said so.

"The new (Confederate) constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
Alexander Stephens, March 21, 1861

"As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race… (the Confederate) flag...would soon take rank among the proudest ensigns of the nations, and be hailed by the civilized world as the white mans flag...As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race."
William T. Thompson, designer of the Confederate flag May 4, 1863

From their inception to their resurrection in the '50s on state flags and courthouses across the South in defense of segregation and Jim Crow, Confederate flags have never been anything else other than symbols of hatred. "Heritage not hate" is a lie easily disproven by the Confederate's own words.