When voices in South Carolina rose to defend the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia in the name of “heritage,” I wondered what exactly they thought that was. Heritage can be anything and everything from the day before yesterday on back, and what matters can be as simple as whatever it was that was stressed in school. Do they understand? I wondered, using they in the sweeping way appropriate to a stranger passing judgment on a distant place, that a century after the battle flag was the emblem raised by gallant farm boys dying in defense of their homeland’s sins, it reigned as the battle flag of Jim Crow? Do they even know what Jim Crow was— those southern whites too young to have lived in it?
They’ll be introduced in Texas this fall.
This sophisticated history doesn’t begin in high school:
- The flag of Mississippi
