re: Alabama Governor Bentley has Confederate flags removed from Capitol grounds

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Fought for the confederacy to defend the land that he owned. It genuinely means something different to him.

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Maybe he did fight for that, but the flag was used in battle by a side with the overall goal of maintaining white supremacy and slavery. A century later it was used by segregationists and racists to continue subjugating the black race.

There are better ways to honor one's ancestors than the flag of a losing side of a war, for a state no longer in existence. A war fought to maintain white supremacy.

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confederate flag is historical and it symbolizes heritage.

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Yes, a heritage of hatred and racism.

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This

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My best friend would tell you that his great great grandfather fought under the flag. Never owned a slave and was poor as dirt. Fought for the confederacy to defend the land that he owned. It genuinely means something different to him.

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and he's right. The vast majority of Southern soldiers did not own slaves and they generally fought because Union soldiers invaded. He is welcome to fly a Confederate flag on his home to honor his ancestor however none of that changes the reason for the war

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Yep. The battle flag wasn't flown above the Capitol building until the 60's. The first time in 1961 on the centennial of the Civil War. It flew for one day and came down. It was put back up there in 1963 the day Robert Kennedy came and met with George Wallace and remained up there until 1993, when it was moved to the monument location.

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A confederate flag was flown a few times before the 1960s, but those were associated with CSA veteran's events. By the 1930s, the CSA veterans had all died off and it didn't come back until the Wallace/Kennedy pissing match.

I've seen a black and white photo from either the teens or maybe 1920s of some type of veterans gathering that was looking up Dexter Avenue and there was a Stars and Bars (which isn't the flag most people think of as the confederate flag) flying.

The government isn't banning it from being sold. Private companies can choose whatever item they want to exclude from their inventory.

A big part of being a free country is letting the private sector make those calls.

I know and I agree. I'm just pointing out the straw man argument of a company banning one thing because it's racist while you're still selling items arguably just as racist (black panther) and things that are much more racist and evil (nazi).

Go on eBay right now and search the word "racist" or any other term you can think of. There is sill plenty of things that are very hateful towards black people on there. So why just ban the stars and bars and nothing else?

The Monument is next.

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Southern soldiers did not own slaves and they generally fought because Union soldiers invaded.

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South fired first.

Twice.

Slavery was more the catalyst that provoked the bigger issue of state's rights for most southerners. It's not that southerners just hated black and wanted to keep them enslaved. It was that they didn't want some politicians from another part of the country making a decision that had such a big effect on their economy. At the time the southern economy was based almost entirely on agriculture driven by slavery.

Most were morally opposed to slavery and saw the evil in it, but thought it necessary to the economy. 99% of slaves were owned by the richest 1% of the population. So most southerners didn't personally own any slaves, or if they did they were more of a house servant then out in the fields picking cotton and getting whipped. But even for those that didn't own a slave, the industry still supported everybody.

They wanted to come to that moral conclusion to end it themselves, instead of being told by somebody who had never set foot south of DC. If left to their own devices to deal with human rights on their own, as the rest of the world was at that time, I imagine there would have been less violence and anger about it and likely less lingering resentment and hate in the long run.




By no means am I typing this in supports of slavery, I'm just trying to provide insight into the line of thinking in the south at the time.
It turns out they were right about the economy as it took over 100 years for the south to recover in that regard. Now we can look back and plainly see that 100 years of poverty is better than even more day of keeping another human in chains, but you can also how that could be a scary and uncertain thing to look ahead to for the future of your family.