Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Recent developments in the public discussion over the proposed SCV license plate that caught my eye.

First, Texas legislators State Representative Sylvester Turner and State Senator Rodney Ellis argue that the state should reject the plate, using familiar arguments against the plan:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans largely dismisses the flag as a symbol of racial oppression and suggests such a view would be a misreading of the flag’s historical significance and use.

But the Sons of Confederate Veterans is attempting to rewrite a history of the South and Southern culture without a critical perspective on the damaging institution of racial slavery. . . .

Texas does not need a state-sanctioned vanity plate for the Confederacy. The reasons for this are clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution and in hundreds of efforts since the Civil War to provide equality for all citizens.

If there are Texans who wish to honor the Confederacy, let them do so on their own, through their organizations and their associations. They have the right to such free speech in the marketplace.

The state should not be a willing party to an effort to honor a symbol of those efforts that sought to divide the nation and, in doing so, fought a senseless war that took the lives of thousands of Americans.

Turner and Ellis are dead right in their assessment that the SCV (and other heritage groups) have turned a blind eye toward the long and ugly history of the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol, choosing to focus instead on a somewhat narrow interpretation of its history in 1861-65, and willfully ignoring its much more recent usage — not by fringe hate groups, but by supposedly “respectable” people — as a symbol of intolerance and violence (figurative, if not actual). No one group, whether the SCV or the NAACP, has the prerogative to unilaterally define what the CBF “means” to others.

It turns out that my county’s Tax Assessor-Collector, Cheryl Johnson, is on the Texas Department of Motor Vehicle License Board that will decide the matter. The last time it came up for a vote (when it tied 4-4), she not only voted in support of it, it was she who made the initial motion to approve a batch of applications that included the SCV plate.

Johnson said she plans to vote for including the plate should it come up for a vote again. She said her support was not for the symbolism of hate but because the state likely would lose a lawsuit and be forced to include it anyway.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans have threatened to sue the state should the resolution not pass.

“To me, it’s a freedom of speech issue,” Johnson said. “(Sons of Confederate Veterans) have sued before to get the license plate and have won. I voted in favor because I didn’t think the state would win any lawsuit.”

So that’s a “yes” vote, but we’ll-get-sued-and-lose-anyway isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the plate.

Finally, Heber Taylor at the Galveston County Daily News suggests that a way around the issue is to use a different flag, on that’s less divisive, and squares well with Texas symbolism:

Use the real flag. The official one. The one that flew over government buildings in Texas during the Civil War.

That flag is called the Stars and Bars, and it has flown at theme parks such as Six Flags Over Texas, where the purpose is to educate customers, rather than to gratuitously offend.

The Stars and Bars doesn’t look like the Confederate battle flag. The official Confederate flag looked a lot like the United States flag — so much so that the soldiers on both sides were confused. In early battles, they tended to shoot friend as well as foe. So the Confederate armies carried a flag with a different design in battle.

The problem with that symbol is its history after the war, during the terror of Jim Crow. Many, perhaps most, people view it as a symbol of hatred and racism.

How do you say yes to history and no to racism?

Actually, it’s not that hard in this case.

The answer is indeed not that hard. Unfortunately Mr. Taylor’s suggestion will be a non-starter, because (as noted previously), this plate has nothing to do with honoring Confederate soldiers or commemorating the war; it’s aboutusing the aegis of state government to promote the SCV as an organization. The proposed plate says nothing about the war, or the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers or civilians; it doesn’t depict a soldier or other item representative of that conflict; it reads “Sons of Confederate Veterans” with the logo of that group, which features the CBF as its central device. They won’t change the flag on the plate because the whole point is to promote the SCV, first and last.

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