Posted on Fri, Dec. 01, 2006

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BOYCOTT ALTERNATIVE

NAACP can still claim victory on flag issue

JAY BENDER

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People won the war to get the Confederate battle flag off the dome and out of the chambers of the legislature.

Now, the organization is losing the peace.

Had the NAACP declared victory the day the flag came down, there would have been no dispute about it being a victory. A victory not just for African-Americans, but for all South Carolinians who understand that a flag flies above the seat of government, and in the halls of government, to reflect the sovereignty of the state or nation.

Of course since South Carolinians are contrarians, the minute someone not in the pale majority suggested that it was rude, insensitive or racist to fly with official sanction a flag that had been waved in battle by armed forces dedicated to the perpetuation of slavery, that flag was coming down only when the halyard was pried from the cold, dead fingers of those among us who continue to believe that South Carolina's finest moment came in 1861.

A compromise was reached. The flag would come down from the dome. The flag would be removed from the chambers of the Senate and House. A flag of a slightly different, more historically authentic design would fly adjacent to the monument to Confederate dead.

The politicians were pleased. Many people of African and European ancestry in the state were pleased. The white "Forget Never" crowd marched and howled and harrumphed in protest.

The NAACP wasn't any more pleased with the compromise than were the reactors and re-enactors. The economic boycott was to continue, and the NAACP would hold its meetings beyond our borders.

One does not need to be an economist to see that any muscle the boycott might have had has atrophied in the years since the flag came off the dome.

I have a plan to end the boycott and get the flag off the Statehouse grounds and out of the hands of the Klan.

According to historian O. Vernon Burton, at the commencement of the Civil War, 60 percent of South Carolina's population was enslaved. If 60 percent of our state's population was freed from slavery as a result of that war, we as a state cannot moan that "we" lost that war.

My plan is to have the NAACP, in a bold and aggressive move, embrace the flag as a flag of liberation and freedom. Had the deluded protagonists not marched off to war under that flag, slavery might have continued even longer while Congress temporized and compromised.

Nothing will get that flag off the grounds of the Statehouse and out of the hands of the haters faster than photos in all the newspapers of the country showing a thousand black faces marching to the dome on Martin Luther King Day and a thousand black hands waving the flag as a symbol of the joy of liberation and a reminder of the foolishness of tyranny.