For a brief moment, after a white supremacist carried out a massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., it seemed as though the Confederate battle flag, that most divisive of symbols, might soon be on its way out of the American political arena.
But now that explosive and complicated vestige of the Old South is back, in a new — and, to some Americans, newly disturbing — context. During President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign, followers drawn to his rallies occasionally displayed the flag and other Confederate iconography. Since the election, his supporters and others have displayed the flag as a kind of rejoinder to anti-Trump protesters in places such as Durango, Colo.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Hampton, Va.; Fort Worth; and Traverse City, Mich.
On Election Day in Silverton, Ore., the flag appeared at a high school Trump rally, where students reportedly told Hispanic classmates, “Pack your bags, you’re leaving tomorrow.” The day after, at Kenyon College in Ohio, the college’s president, Sean M. Decatur, spoke to a worried campus, describing his discomfort at seeing Confederate flags on display in the nearby city of Mount Vernon.
Dorothy Robinson, 37, said that seeing the battle flag flying at a traditional postelection unity parade in her hometown, Georgetown, Del., felt “like someone had punched me in the gut.”
Those who have publicly embraced the flag are a small minority of the more than 60 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump in the Nov. 8 election.
But these incidents, and hundreds of reports of insults and threats directed at minorities and others, are forcing Americans to confront vexing questions about the future of race relations under Mr. Trump and the extent to which his campaign has animated white resentment and even a budding white nationalism.
The emergence of the flag in a postelection context also comes as liberals and others have harshly criticized Mr. Trump for appointing as his chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, a website they accuse of trafficking in anti-Semitic, misogynist and anti-Muslim ideas.
Shortly after the June 17, 2015, Charleston massacre, an article posted on Breitbart argued that the Confederacy was “a patriotic and idealistic cause,” and that its flag “proclaims a glorious heritage.”
“Every tree, every rooftop, every picket fence, every telegraph pole in the South should be festooned with the Confederate battle flag,” the author, Gerald Warner, wrote. “Hoist it high and fly it with pride.”
How much the flag’s resurgence reflects anything more than the sentiments of those who fly it remains unclear.
Mr. Trump, a native New Yorker, declared shortly after announcing his candidacy that he supported a call by Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina to remove the flag from the grounds of the Statehouse there after the mass shooting in Charleston. The state legislature, after passionate debate, eventually agreed to remove the flag.
“I think they should put it in the museum, let it go, respect whatever it is that you have to respect, because it was a point in time, and put it in a museum,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the time.
Historians say the battle flag has had shifting meanings over time: a symbol of white resistance to integration during the Civil Rights era, a more complicated but still racially charged symbol now.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Virginia who has written extensively about the South, segregation and white Americans, said the flag has long been a symbol for outsiders and a rebuke to the forces of decorum and political correctness.
She said its use now both in the South and outside it, could be seen as an expression of concern that white culture “has been displaced as the norm.”
“Maybe for the first time ever, definitely in my lifetime, people outside the South are, in a very public way, claiming a white racial identity,” she said.
Stephen Moss, a Republican state representative from the small town of Blacksburg, S.C., was one of a number of lawmakers who voted against removing the flag from the Statehouse grounds in July 2015. To Mr. Moss, a supporter of Mr. Trump, the flag represents the heritage of those who fought for the Confederacy. But he acknowledged that the flag had also been “hijacked by hate groups.”
Asked why the flag was turning up in the hands of Trump supporters, he said he thought that it might be part of a backlash of working white voters who suspect that people — in their minds, often minorities — are taking advantage of the federal welfare system.
“A lot of these people who go to work every day are in the line at the grocery store, and over half the people are bringing out these cards” to pay for the groceries, he said.
Two days after the presidential race concluded, Ms. Robinson, a writer and editor who lives in Maplewood, N.J., was back in her hometown to watch the Return Day parade, a long-running tradition in which winners and losers of local elections ride through town together in a show of unity, and party leaders come together to bury an actual hatchet.
There were marching bands and smiling faces, and Ms. Robinson felt that perhaps the country was on its way to healing after a particularly ugly election.
Then a white Chevrolet pickup rolled by, flying an American flag, a Donald Trump flag and the battle flag. Ms. Robinson, a white Hillary Clinton supporter, was standing next to a black friend at the time.
“I wasn’t shocked, I was horrified,” said Ms. Robinson. She suspects that some white Trump supporters are indulging in new freedom to be politically incorrect now that the nation’s first African-American president is on the way out.
Mr. Trump declared his candidacy on June 16, 2015, the day before the Charleston massacre. He would go on to see his political stock rise at the same time as pro-flag backlash was emerging, particularly among people who felt their heritage as white Southerners was under attack. Across the country, flag supporters staged more than 350 rallies after the Charleston shooting.
During the campaign, the activist and filmmaker Rod Webber documented the sale of Confederate flags with “Trump 2016” emblazoned on them outside of a Trump rally in Pittsburgh. He said that he saw the flags for sale outside of about 10 other campaign rallies.
In August, inside a rally in Kissimmee, Fla., a Trump supporter named Brandon Partin draped such a flag over a railing, although a campaign staff member and the local police eventually had it removed.
Afterward, Mr. Partin told CNN that he was not a racist or a white supremacist, and he argued that the flag was about the Civil War, which he said “wasn’t about racism at all,” because blacks fought in both Northern and Southern armies.
Mr. Partin said that he thought Mr. Trump would be fine with the display of the flag. “Because he understands the history,” he said.
Since Election Day, anecdotal accounts of discrimination targeting racial and religious minorities and lesbian, gays, bisexual and transgender people have overrun news reports and social media. National anti-hate organizations have begun tracking the reports, seeking to verify their veracity and identify trends. The Southern Poverty Law Center has received more than 430 reports, the majority of them for anti-immigrant behavior, followed by anti-black episodes. Many of the events have occurred on elementary, middle and high school campuses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/u...ackage-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
But now that explosive and complicated vestige of the Old South is back, in a new — and, to some Americans, newly disturbing — context. During President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign, followers drawn to his rallies occasionally displayed the flag and other Confederate iconography. Since the election, his supporters and others have displayed the flag as a kind of rejoinder to anti-Trump protesters in places such as Durango, Colo.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Hampton, Va.; Fort Worth; and Traverse City, Mich.
On Election Day in Silverton, Ore., the flag appeared at a high school Trump rally, where students reportedly told Hispanic classmates, “Pack your bags, you’re leaving tomorrow.” The day after, at Kenyon College in Ohio, the college’s president, Sean M. Decatur, spoke to a worried campus, describing his discomfort at seeing Confederate flags on display in the nearby city of Mount Vernon.
Dorothy Robinson, 37, said that seeing the battle flag flying at a traditional postelection unity parade in her hometown, Georgetown, Del., felt “like someone had punched me in the gut.”
Those who have publicly embraced the flag are a small minority of the more than 60 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump in the Nov. 8 election.
But these incidents, and hundreds of reports of insults and threats directed at minorities and others, are forcing Americans to confront vexing questions about the future of race relations under Mr. Trump and the extent to which his campaign has animated white resentment and even a budding white nationalism.
The emergence of the flag in a postelection context also comes as liberals and others have harshly criticized Mr. Trump for appointing as his chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, a website they accuse of trafficking in anti-Semitic, misogynist and anti-Muslim ideas.
Shortly after the June 17, 2015, Charleston massacre, an article posted on Breitbart argued that the Confederacy was “a patriotic and idealistic cause,” and that its flag “proclaims a glorious heritage.”
“Every tree, every rooftop, every picket fence, every telegraph pole in the South should be festooned with the Confederate battle flag,” the author, Gerald Warner, wrote. “Hoist it high and fly it with pride.”
How much the flag’s resurgence reflects anything more than the sentiments of those who fly it remains unclear.
Mr. Trump, a native New Yorker, declared shortly after announcing his candidacy that he supported a call by Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina to remove the flag from the grounds of the Statehouse there after the mass shooting in Charleston. The state legislature, after passionate debate, eventually agreed to remove the flag.
“I think they should put it in the museum, let it go, respect whatever it is that you have to respect, because it was a point in time, and put it in a museum,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the time.
Historians say the battle flag has had shifting meanings over time: a symbol of white resistance to integration during the Civil Rights era, a more complicated but still racially charged symbol now.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Virginia who has written extensively about the South, segregation and white Americans, said the flag has long been a symbol for outsiders and a rebuke to the forces of decorum and political correctness.
She said its use now both in the South and outside it, could be seen as an expression of concern that white culture “has been displaced as the norm.”
“Maybe for the first time ever, definitely in my lifetime, people outside the South are, in a very public way, claiming a white racial identity,” she said.
Stephen Moss, a Republican state representative from the small town of Blacksburg, S.C., was one of a number of lawmakers who voted against removing the flag from the Statehouse grounds in July 2015. To Mr. Moss, a supporter of Mr. Trump, the flag represents the heritage of those who fought for the Confederacy. But he acknowledged that the flag had also been “hijacked by hate groups.”
Asked why the flag was turning up in the hands of Trump supporters, he said he thought that it might be part of a backlash of working white voters who suspect that people — in their minds, often minorities — are taking advantage of the federal welfare system.
“A lot of these people who go to work every day are in the line at the grocery store, and over half the people are bringing out these cards” to pay for the groceries, he said.
Two days after the presidential race concluded, Ms. Robinson, a writer and editor who lives in Maplewood, N.J., was back in her hometown to watch the Return Day parade, a long-running tradition in which winners and losers of local elections ride through town together in a show of unity, and party leaders come together to bury an actual hatchet.
There were marching bands and smiling faces, and Ms. Robinson felt that perhaps the country was on its way to healing after a particularly ugly election.
Then a white Chevrolet pickup rolled by, flying an American flag, a Donald Trump flag and the battle flag. Ms. Robinson, a white Hillary Clinton supporter, was standing next to a black friend at the time.
“I wasn’t shocked, I was horrified,” said Ms. Robinson. She suspects that some white Trump supporters are indulging in new freedom to be politically incorrect now that the nation’s first African-American president is on the way out.
Mr. Trump declared his candidacy on June 16, 2015, the day before the Charleston massacre. He would go on to see his political stock rise at the same time as pro-flag backlash was emerging, particularly among people who felt their heritage as white Southerners was under attack. Across the country, flag supporters staged more than 350 rallies after the Charleston shooting.
During the campaign, the activist and filmmaker Rod Webber documented the sale of Confederate flags with “Trump 2016” emblazoned on them outside of a Trump rally in Pittsburgh. He said that he saw the flags for sale outside of about 10 other campaign rallies.
In August, inside a rally in Kissimmee, Fla., a Trump supporter named Brandon Partin draped such a flag over a railing, although a campaign staff member and the local police eventually had it removed.
Afterward, Mr. Partin told CNN that he was not a racist or a white supremacist, and he argued that the flag was about the Civil War, which he said “wasn’t about racism at all,” because blacks fought in both Northern and Southern armies.
Mr. Partin said that he thought Mr. Trump would be fine with the display of the flag. “Because he understands the history,” he said.
Since Election Day, anecdotal accounts of discrimination targeting racial and religious minorities and lesbian, gays, bisexual and transgender people have overrun news reports and social media. National anti-hate organizations have begun tracking the reports, seeking to verify their veracity and identify trends. The Southern Poverty Law Center has received more than 430 reports, the majority of them for anti-immigrant behavior, followed by anti-black episodes. Many of the events have occurred on elementary, middle and high school campuses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/u...ackage-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
