Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (review)

Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South. Edited by J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. xv, 351. $49.95.)

The editors (who are also contributors) have assembled a work by political scientists that is worth the attention of everyone interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction. The book's essays support the theme that Confederate symbols, especially flags and monuments, became increasingly controversial in the South and the nation after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The essayists emphasize that these controversies intensified during the 1980s and 1990s.

Eight new essays effectively complement three chapters previously published in Social Science Quarterly, Yale Law Journal, and Southeastern Political Review. Basing their work on research in a variety of sources, the authors stress that since the 1950s various groups have expropriated Confederate symbols, especially the battle flag. These groups have included political factions, such as the "Dixiecrats" of 1948; divisive organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan; and social clubs (the editors call them "traditionalists"), such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Consequently, Confederate symbols were adulterated and became ambiguous despite the efforts of Southern "traditionalists" to revere and defend them by maintaining that Confederate flags and monuments should be equated with Southern honor and Southern heritage. The authors describe how Confederate symbols came into public view in many ways, including shirts, patches, decals, vehicle bumper stickers, tote bags, and beach blankets. Confederate battle flags waved at rallies protesting integration but also at sports events all across the South, particularly at college football games, where black players were on the field.

Moreover, the Confederate battle flag continued to fly from public buildings as well as at parks, monuments, and cemeteries. Several contributors analyze public reactions from the 1950s through the 1990s to the presence of the Confederate battle flag atop the state capitols in Columbia, South Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama, and its incorporation into the Georgia state flag in 1956. Controversy over integration drew fresh attention to the Mississippi state flag, redesigned in 1895 by adding the Confederate battle flag as its canton. Thus in Mississippi and Georgia--at schools, colleges, courthouses, banks, and other public places--citizens and tourists were greeted daily with state flags incorporating a version of the Confederacy's most well known symbol. The editors delineate how, by the 1980s, some schools and businesses in Georgia refused to fly the state flag. Furthermore, they further describe the failed campaign of Georgia's governor, Zell Miller, a Democrat, who advocated deleting the Confederate symbol and returning the state flag to an earlier design. Authors Robert Holmes and M. Christine Cagle recapitulate the efforts during the 1990s by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to lower the Confederate flag from South Carolina's state capitol. Debates over that flag captured the attention of the nation's media, citizens, officeholders, and political candidates. In 2000, after this book was published, the South Carolina legislature voted to remove the flag from the capitol and post it elsewhere on the statehouse grounds.

One of the book's few faults is that the editors allow contributors to overuse such terms as "recent," "today," and "past ten years," words that instantly date the chapters and give these well-researched essays a tinge of journalism. In most cases, alternative phrases could have been chosen, such as "since 1990" or "during the 1980s."

All involved in this project are to be congratulated for bringing together chapters that summarize salient debates over the Confederate symbols in the modern South. The essays in this book point out how historical events and symbols of the 1860s created controversies across America more than a century after the Civil War. These cogent essays also prompt questions about how Confederate symbols remain unresolved issues in American public life. For instance, will the state flags of...