Alt-America. David Neiwert
much clearer, and much darker, meaning, and many Southerners decided it was time to be done with it. Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama ordered the removal of the Confederate flag flying over the statehouse in Montgomery. Governors in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland announced that they would cease offering state license plates featuring the flag. Mississippi legislators vowed to remove the symbol permanently from their own state flag.
Retailers around the country, including Wal-Mart, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Sears, and Target, announced they would be pulling Confederate flags and related merchandise from their offerings. The largest flag manufacturers announced they were stopping their Confederate flag production line.
Monuments to the Confederacy and its heroes came under fire. In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered the removal of four statues, including the sixty-foot column in the heart of the city bearing the figure of General Robert E. Lee.
In Memphis, the city council voted to remove a memorial to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a famed Confederate leader and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
In pop culture, too, the flag was being banned. Warner Bros. announced it was ceasing production of its “General Lee” toy cars. As for real cars, NASCAR’s chairman announced the company would no longer sanction any use of the flag, and a number of prominent drivers, including Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon, publicly supported the move. NASCAR races are traditionally a favored location to fly the Confederate flag, but in early July, all NASCAR tracks issued a joint statement asking for fans to refrain from flying or waving the Confederate flag at races.
Official proscriptions of the flag were one thing—reality on the ground, another. As the weeks went by, NASCAR’s order was increasingly ignored. More and more Confederate flags started appearing in the stands. At the Coke Zero 400 in Florida on July 6, held at Daytona International Speedway, thousands of fans showed up with Confederate flags. Most of them angrily denounced NASCAR’s “political correctness.”
“NASCAR is too quick to try to be politically correct like everybody else,” said Paul Stevens, of Port Orange, Florida.
Another NASCAR fan, Steven Rebenstorf, said, “The Confederate flag has absolutely nothing to do with slavery. It has nothing to do with divisiveness. It has nothing to do with any of that. It was just a battle banner until the Ku Klux Klan draped it around themselves. Now, all of a sudden, it represents slavery and that’s not at all true.”
“It’s just a Southern pride thing,” Larry Reeves from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, told the Associated Press. “It’s nothing racist or anything.”
The backlash to the backlash grew in volume. On July 17, one week after the flag came down at the South Carolina statehouse, the Ku Klux Klan held a protest in Columbia to demand that it be restored. Several hundred KKK protesters were met by an even larger crowd of counterprotesters, including a number of radical New Black Panthers. Police had trouble keeping the two sides from tangling, and five people wound up being arrested. Confederate flags were everywhere.
And it turned out to be a lovely day to recruit new members to the Klan.
“We’re just trying to save our heritage,” Roy Pemberton, a sixty-two-year-old Klansman, told potential recruits he met at the rally, most of them middle-aged white men. Pemberton handed them business cards with the group’s hotline number and its slogan: “Racial Purity Is America’s Security!”
“If they continue … there will be a war, and we will fight for our heritage,” Pemberton said. “There are things the South will fight for, and that is one of them. If it continues, there will be bloodshed.”
The new backlash provided recruitment opportunities for the racist radical right, and not just the Klan.
Some of the most eager defenders of the flag were so-called neo-Confederates, far-right Southern ideologues who argue that the cause of the South was just, and agitate for modern-day secession. Two of their favorite organizations now leapt to the fore: the League of the South (LoS), an anti-black hate group, and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans (SCV), a formerly legitimate Southern-heritage group that in recent years has been hijacked by neo-Confederates. Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, defended the Confederate banner, declaring, “The Confederate battle flag, along with our other cultural icons, is not merely an historical banner that represents the South. It is a shorthand symbol of our very ethnic identity as a distinct people—Southerners.”
In Alabama, a joint protest in Montgomery by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and the League of the South took place a week after Bentley removed the flag from the statehouse. William Flowers, vice chairman of the Georgia LoS, told the gathering, “We are pushing now to reach out and grab the hearts and minds of fellow Southerners to pull them in to believing that the politicians have betrayed them because it is true. They do not represent your interests. They have stabbed you in the back.”
By the second weekend of July, more than seventy protests had been organized in eight states formerly in the Confederacy, drawing more than 10,000 participants. One rally, in Ocala, Florida, featured an eight-mile procession with more than 1,500 cars. These events quickly became recruitment magnets for groups eager to defend the flag and all that it represented.
James Edwards, host of the far-right radio show the Political Cesspool, charged that “our societal overseers” hated the South and the “symbol of our unique identity before the murders that took place in Charleston occurred.” He accused these new “overseers” of “exploiting the tragedy in order to launch an attempt to completely eradicate the Confederate flag and any memory of the righteous cause for which it stood.” The “righteous cause” included the defense of white supremacy. It was a reiteration of the beliefs that had lain behind the displays of the Confederate flag since the defeat in the Civil War.
The Klan became publicly involved in the campaign to remove the remains of Confederate war hero (and Ku Klux Klan founding father) from their Memphis monument. Thom Robb, head of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, offered via press release to move the general’s statue and remains to Robb’s Christian Revival Center near Harrison, Arkansas.
In Alabama, a nominally mainstream “heritage” group called the Alabama Flaggers congregated at the statehouse to protest the flag’s removal there and extended an open invitation to League of the South members to attend. The Flaggers posted on Facebook: “We are rallying for the Secession from the United States of America. Bring your … secession flags [and] your secession signs.”
The backlash soon spilled out of the South. Pro-Confederate flag rallies were held in such disparate locations as Phoenix, Spokane, and Warsaw, Indiana. By late August, there had been more than 200 such rallies, and by December the total had reached 356. The attendance was generally sparse, but it was often loud, with an ugly tone of anti-black and anti–civil rights animus.
On July 14, when President Obama traveled to Durant, Oklahoma, to speak to students at the high school, he was met by a cluster of protesters who were angry about the Confederate flag prohibitions.
“We’re not gonna stand down from our heritage. You know, this flag’s not racist. And I know a lot of people think it is, but it’s really not. It’s just a Southern thing, that’s it,” Trey Johnson told TV reporters. He had driven three hours from Texas to join the protest.
Things turned frightening in the Atlanta suburb of Douglasville on July 25. A family of African Americans was celebrating a child’s birthday when a convoy of trucks bearing Confederate flags began trolling past, drawing the ire of several people at the party, who yelled at them to leave. At that point, more than seven pickup trucks circled and then parked in the field in front of their home, the passengers yelling racial epithets and threatening the families.
“One had a gun, saying he was gonna kill the niggers,” the party’s hostess, Melissa Alford, told a reporter. “Then one of them said, ‘Gimme the gun, I’ll shoot them niggers.’”
It was all caught on video. Later that fall fifteen people were indicted for making terrorist threats and engaging in “criminal street activity.” Most of those indicted were members of a Georgia group, Respect the