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POINT AFTER
Look Away, Dixie
Land
It's time for Ole Miss to acknowledge what the Rebel flag
truly stands for and ban
it
by William
Nack
Posted: Tue October 28, 1997
Nearly all around Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, from the walls along its
upper sweeps down to the lower seats, you could see the
Confederate flag dancing at the ends of poles and sticks in
the wet wind. On the field Mississippi was having at
Alabama, and in the stands
the Ole Miss fans waved the flag whenever the Rebels gave
them reason to. In the northeast corner of the stadium, a
student section, the Rebel flag was worn on baseball caps,
above the pockets of clean white shirts, on neckties neatly
knotted at the
throat. It was everywhere.
No one was chestier in
flaunting the banner than Clay Brooks, a 19-year-old
banking and finance major from Winona, Miss., who had painted
the Rebel flag in color from below his navel to the base of
his neck. "I wanted to do something different,"
said Brooks. "I'm just having fun. If they don't like
it, they can kiss my
flag."
This was last Saturday
afternoon, in Oxford, Miss., and it wasn't Mississippi burning
again, of course—not as in the 1960s, when civil rights
workers were murdered there and churches went up in flames,
and Governor
Ross
Barnett
stood defiantly in the doors of Ole Miss in a futile
attempt
to block James Meredith from becoming the first black
student to enroll. What happened on Saturday suggested, at
worst, a straggling band of Old South adolescents still
playing with matches, fascinated by fire, and, at best, a
small army of adults and
students reverting to their terrible twos. (Ask them not to
gargle their milk, and they spill it on the floor.) Crowds
at Ole Miss home football games have been hoisting the
Rebel flag for years—since the Dixiecrats, rebelling
against a civil rights
plank, walked out of the 1948 Democratic Convention—but last
week's demonstration of flag-waving was unusually
widespread, a reaction to a recent movement to keep the
Confederacy's symbol out of the
stadium.
Complaining that the flag was tarnishing the school's image
and sabotaging his efforts at recruiting blue-chip black
players—rival schools, he says, were using the flag to
warn black athletes away from Oxford—Mississippi football
coach Tommy Tuberville
has been urging fans to carry a less divisive banner, one
bearing the letter M studded with stars. Then, on Oct. 21,
the student government passed a resolution urging students
to leave the Rebel flags at home because
of the racial unrest the flags were
causing. Finally, for "safety" reasons, the university
administration banned the carrying of sticks—i.e.,
flagstaffs of any size—into the stadium, effective Nov. 1.
That made the game against Alabama the last at which flags
on sticks would be allowed in
Vaught-Hemingway, and many fans arrived carrying the Rebel banner
to protest the
ban.
Ole Miss is a house divided. The flag issue generated a
heated
debate at last month's annual meeting of the alumni association.
Under the racially charged heading "Stop the Lynching
of Ole Miss and Southern Heritage," a Jackson, Miss.,
citizens' group recently sent out a mailing, with a
Confederate flag on the envelope, asking for money to
support its cause. Among those unfurling the Rebel flag on
Saturday, there was much talk about it as an inspirational
symbol of Southern heritage
and chivalry, of Old South pride and tradition. It was like
listening to members of the Flat Earth
Society.
The fact is, in its most memorable incarnation at Ole Miss,
the Rebel flag served as the rallying symbol for white
students protesting integration after Meredith was enrolled
in 1962, a lamentable desecration of the banner that Robert
E. Lee honored in
battle. Since then the flag has fallen even further: It's
seen most commonly today on the back windows of pickup
trucks and on bikers' denim jackets. Its inflammatory
message is so clear that it
cannot mean one thing outside the gates and another thing
within.
Today about 12% of the 10,745 students at Ole Miss are
black, including half the football team, and to those
students the meaning of the flag is clear. "It's not a
symbol of tradition but of oppression and exclusion,"
says Charles Ross, an assistant
professor in Mississippi's Afro-American studies
program.
Symbols, like pointed sticks, can hurt. Strike the
colors.
Issue date: November 3, 1997
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