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

I'm reading where people are saying things like "now they will want to tear down monuments to soldiers" and what not. I don't think so. It's not like where people in Poland were knocking down statues of Lenin after the Red Army leaves.

We didn't have governors and legislatures in the 1960s using soldiers' monuments as props for the defense of Segregation and Jim Crow. I've not seen the Klan or other extremists making a big deal out of a monument to the dead of some TN Infantry regiment at Shiloh.

Just a whole different dynamic going on with the flag. They should have kept the flag out of it in the 1960s if they didn't want it to be linked with contemporary opposition to civil rights and equality for all citizens.

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I visited Montgomery in the early 1990s. But have not been back since. I took a tour of the state capitol. I don't remember seeing this flag. I don't think the tour guide talked about it. If it was there, they certainly weren't making a big show out of its presence

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If you were there before 1993, you'd have seen a bigassed naval ensign flying over the capitol. It flew from 1963-1993. George Wallace had it raised during his fights with the feds.

It was removed in 1993 and small but historically correct flags were raised at the monument basically to appease those that wanted to keep one over the dome.

To be honest, no matter what you think those flags stood for then or today, nobody really has a reason to be upset over their removal because for the first century after the end of the war, they weren't flown at the capitol. They were only raised as a symbol of defiance in the face of the federal government over integration and other civil rights issues. I can't speak to the situation in other states, but in Alabama, no longstanding tradition was eliminated. Instead, things were actually set back to normal.