Time will tell if furling the rebel flag means deeper change

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Across the South, Confederate symbols are toppling, teetering or at least getting critical new looks. But is it a sign of real change in a region known for fiercely defending its complex traditions, or simply the work of frightened politicians and nervous corporate bean counters scrambling for cover in the wake of another white-on-black atrocity?

Probably a bit of both, says author Tracy Thompson.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of expedient backtracking going on,” said Thompson, who wrote “The New Mind of the South.” “If it’s going in the right direction, who cares?”

One who does care is the Rev. Joseph Darby — a longtime friend of Clementa Pinckney, one of nine slain during a Bible study at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. And he thinks it’s a bit premature to declare this a new “New South,” as some commentators have suggested.

“Taking down those flags is not that big a deal,” he said of Gov. Nikki Haley’s call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse lawn and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s order to take down four rebel banners from a memorial at his capitol. Some citizens have long taken offense to the flags, which they associate with racial conflict.

“There are a few other things on the agenda,” Darby said, including improving public education and equal justice. But Darby, who has been fighting since 1999 to bring down the Confederate flag, said, “I think it’s a first step that hopefully will lead to real change. If nothing else changes, it’ll ultimately be cosmetic.”

Still, even skeptics like Darby have to concede that the speed and geographic spread with which these developments have occurred are nothing short of historic. Governors in Virginia and North Carolina say the battle flag should come off specialty license plates; Georgia has stopped issuing the plates, and a bill to do the same was introduced by a Tennessee legislator; Arkansas-based Wal-Mart vowed to stop selling all Confederate gear.

“I’m looking for snow in South Carolina any day now,” Darby deadpanned as the temperatures hovered near triple digits.

“One of the ways the South changes is through embarrassment, or through some incident,” said Ferrel Guillory, an expert on Southern culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The June 17 massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, allegedly by a self-described white supremacist named Dylann Roof, was just such an incident.

“Something dramatic happened — something tragic that stunned people,” said Guillory, director of UNC’s Program on Public Life. “And it’s got them to move.”

But people said the same things in 1955, when 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, shot and tossed into a Mississippi river with a cotton gin motor around his neck.

They said it again in 1963, when a Ku Klux Klan bomb tore through Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls on a Sunday morning.

Yes, those crimes helped galvanize the civil rights movement and pave the way for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. But challenges to Jim Crow also prompted states like South Carolina to hoist the Confederate battle flag atop their capitol domes in defiance, said James C. Cobb, a professor of history at the University of Georgia.

“There were plenty of white Southerners all during the civil rights movement who knew deep down that supporting what was going on — not only supporting racial discrimination, but supporting violence and the kinds of forms of resistance that white Southerners were putting up — was wrong,” said Cobb, author of the book “Away Down South,” about the region’s identity. “But they kept eyeing each other, hoping that somebody else would be the one to make the first move. And so it took forever and ever and ever for that to happen.”

For the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who’s had that battle flag thrust in his face too many times to count, its removal would be something wondrous.

Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said he always knew the flag would come down. He just wasn’t sure he’d live to see it.

“I never thought I’d see a black president,” he said from his home in Atlanta. “But I have. And God has so willed it.”

The 93-year-old activist doesn’t “give a rap” what motivations are behind all this, “as long as it changes.”

“That’s how progress is,” he said. “In the air. It’s in the wind.”