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Why The Fourth Of July Feels (Refreshingly) Different This Year

Why The Fourth Of July Feels (Refreshingly) Different This Year

For every American who venerates the ideals set down by this country’s founders in the Declaration of Independence, July 4 is a day of reflection as well as celebration. For me, this holiday has also become an occasion to point out that liberals and progressives cherish those principles, along with the symbols that represent them, just as fervently as our conservative compatriots.

So over the past several years, I’ve written an annual Independence Day column examining the politics of patriotism – and exploding the myths behind the right-wing monopoly on patriotic expression like so many festive firecrackers.

Looking back over American history, it isn’t difficult to argue that the Sons (and daughters!) of Liberty were the progressives of their era, fighting to end monarchy and aristocracy, in bitter conflict with Tory conservatism. Nor is it hard to show that the abolitionists whose movement sparked the Civil War were the progressives of their time, battling the revanchist conservatism of the Confederacy. Or that the liberals of the New Deal era, struggling to save the world from fascism, confronted entrenched resistance from prominent rightist and corporate leaders — sometimes in league with the nation’s foreign enemies — whose heirs later founded the modern conservative movement.

In all those historic turning points is embedded a fundamental truth, that the right’s claim to patriotic exclusivity is and always was ludicrous. Repeating that  every year is a necessary corrective as the wingnuts wrap themselves in Old Glory, pretending once more to be its sole owners.

But July 4, 2015 is a little different.

Following the massacre of nine innocent citizens by a thug named Dylann Roof at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, the national discourse has turned toward an important issue raised annually in those July 4 columns. At long last, the Confederate battle flag, a banner of racism, segregation, secession, and yes, treason, may be removed from public display in state Capitols across the South – because Roof waved that flag while stomping and burning ours in the pictures posted on his website. A long overdue movement toward that flag’s interment in museums, where it belongs with all the other regalia of the old slave regime, has won support from the same kind of politicians who once enabled its disgraceful flaunting.

In South Carolina, Republican governor Nikki Haley, recognizing the imperative of this moment, stood with Democrats and African-American leaders as she called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol grounds. According to the Associated Press, she can expect enough legislators in her party to vote for that change. In Mississippi, Republican legislative leaders are calling for the Confederate symbol to be struck from their state flag. Jeb Bush, who removed the Confederate flag from public display when he was governor of Florida, finally spoke up in support of Haley’s initiative. So did Mitt Romney. Walmart, a company based in Arkansas, has announced that it will no longer market items bearing that emblem.

And those Republicans have spoken up despite polls showing that most members of their party, especially in the GOP’s Southern heartland, still condone the display of Confederate symbols. Southern chapters of the Tea Party cling to the Stars and Bars, while ventilating the usual swill about “states’ rights” and the Constitution. They have closed ranks with the fascist right, including the usual suspects in neo-Nazi cells, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose racist propaganda inspired Dylann Roof.

Obviously the Tea Party’s self-proclaimed super-patriots lack enough wit to notice the embarrassing irony of their position. It is not possible – indeed, it was never possible, as Robert E. Lee and other honorable Confederate veterans swiftly acknowledged – for anyone loyal to this country to salute that standard or any of its variations. And it is troubling that most of the Republican Party’s presidential candidates cannot yet find the courage and decency – the patriotic morale – to stop pretending otherwise.

On this day, however, in Lincoln’s own spirit of charity toward all and malice toward none, we ought to embrace those Republicans who have reaffirmed their loyalty to the flag that represents all of us. Today we should stand together — as President Obama suggested in his remarkable eulogy of Rev. Clementa Pinckney at Mother Emanuel — to honor the flag that flies over the “United States of America.”

Never Patriotic: The Real Meaning Of The Confederate Flag

Never Patriotic: The Real Meaning Of The Confederate Flag

In the intensifying national debate over the Confederate flag, important clues about the seditious symbol’s true meaning are staring us in the face. Dozens of those clues were posted by an angry, glaring Dylann Storm Roof on the “Last Rhodesian,” website, where the alleged Charleston killer pays homage to certain flags – notably those of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, as well as the old Confederacy – while he enthusiastically desecrates another.

Pictures of Roof burning, stomping, and spitting on the Stars and Stripes are interspersed among the photos of him grasping and waving the Confederate battle flag, sometimes while holding a gun. “I hate the sight of the American flag,” he raged in a long screed on the site. “Modern American patriotism is an absolute joke.”

What this racial terrorist meant to express, in crude prose and pictures, is a lesson that the diehard defenders of the Confederate flag should no longer ignore: To uphold the banner of secession is to reject patriotism – and has never meant anything else.

For many years after the Civil War, the symbols of the Confederacy were not much seen outside local museums and burial grounds. The late general Robert E. Lee, a reluctant but justly revered war hero, rejected any post-war fetishizing of the Stars and Bars, which had actually originated as the battle flag of his Army of Northern Virginia. Lee believed it “wiser…not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

But such admonishments were cast aside by the exponents of white supremacy, whose own patriotism was certainly suspect. When the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia were revived as racial terror organizations in the 1930s and 1940s, carrying out a spree of cowardly lynchings, their grand wizards found natural allies among the leaders of the German-American Bund — whose funding and fealty were eventually traced to Nazi headquarters in Berlin. Indeed, the Klansmen burned their towering crosses alongside swastika banners at rallies sponsored by the Bund to attack President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the years following the Second World War, the Dixiecrats led by South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond – and the “uptown Klan” known as the White Citizens Councils that supported Thurmond’s movement – appropriated the Confederate flag as their own standard. Among its greatest enthusiasts was a young radio reporter (and future U.S. senator) named Jesse Helms, whose fawning coverage of Thurmond’s 1948 third-party presidential bid marked him as a rising star of the segregationist right.

As for the White Citizens Councils, those local groups were ultimately reconstituted into chapters of the Council of Conservative Citizens – a notorious hate group that has embarrassed many Republican politicians caught fraternizing with its leaders, and that ultimately inspired Roof with its inflammatory propaganda about black crime and the endangered white race. Headquartered in St. Louis, MO, the CCC festoons itself and its works with the Dixie flag, as does the neo-Confederate League of the South, which still openly advocates secession.

Meanwhile, racist, anti-Semitic agitators such as David Duke and Don Black — both Southerners prominent in Klan and neo-Nazi organizations for decades — have never ceased to manifest their reverence for the Confederacy. Stormfront, the notorious neo-Nazi website founded by Black, continues to promote the mythology and symbolism of the Southern cause, declaring in a June 23 podcast that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery — and that “the attack on southern symbols and heritage such as the Confederate Flag are actually part of an overall Jewish-led attack on European Americans.” Owing to Duke’s influence, in fact, the Confederate flag has served as a substitute for Nazi banners in demonstrations, often violent, by “white nationalists” in Europe — where the symbols of the Third Reich are widely outlawed.

Obviously, not every American who has displayed the Dixie flag endorses the treason and bigotry that it now represents to so many other Americans. There are sincere patriots, like former senator James Webb of Virginia, who still insist that it is only a remembrance of the valor of their ancestors. But over the decades, its appropriation by traitors and bigots has provoked little noticeable protest from the more innocent exponents of respect for Southern heritage. Today, the Charleston massacre has left it standing irrevocably for the most brutal and criminal aspects of that heritage – and it is more deeply irreconcilable with American patriotism than ever.

Charleston Church Massacre Raises Profile Of White Nationalist Group — And Its GOP Connections

Charleston Church Massacre Raises Profile Of White Nationalist Group — And Its GOP Connections

Dylann Roof, the confessed murderer at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, has at least one group of people that agrees with his fanatical racism — and it might cause some complications for some Republican politicians.

In his manifesto, Roof has written about being influenced by a white supremacist organization known as the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). And on Sunday night, the CCC posted its own response regarding Roof’s “legitimate grievances.”

“The C of CC unequivocally condemns Roof’s murderous actions,” the group’s statement said. “However, the council stands unshakably behind the facts on its website, and points out the dangers of denying the extent of black-on-white crime.”

The statement by group spokesman Jared Taylor also added (with all emphasis in the original):

Our society’s silence about these crimes—despite enormous amounts of attention to “racially tinged” acts by whites—only increase the anger of people like Dylann Roof. This double standard *only makes acts of murderous frustration more likely*.

In his manifesto, Roof outlines other grievances felt by many whites. Again, we utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed. *Ignoring legitimate grievances is dangerous*.

The Guardian did some digging, and discovered that the group’s leader, Earl Holt, has donated $65,000 to Republican campaigns in recent years, including Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz. Upon being asked about this, Cruz’s campaign told the paper that it will be refunding Holt’s money — while Rand Paul’s has chosen a much better move, telling Politico that it will be donating the money to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund, to assist Roof’s victims and their families.

The Council of Conservative Citizens is a white nationalist organization, declaring on its website that they “oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

The group was first officially organized in 1985 — but has long been identified as simply being the successor to an older movement of racist organizations, known as the white Citizens Councils, which went back to 1954.

Those previous groups, sometimes referred as “the uptown Klan,” were made up of white supremacists who organized to resist the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and often practiced such tactics as the boycotting or blacklisting of pro-civil rights individuals from the local business communities.

Former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour (R-MS) landed in hot water early in the 2012 campaign cycle, during a time when he was seen as a potential presidential candidate, after he openly praised the original Citizens Councils for keeping order, supposedly by suppressing the Klan. (A skeptic would argue that to the extent this was even true, they simply crowded out the Klan in order to make sure white supremacy could maintain a sheen of public respectability.)

But over the years, the CCC has itself maintained genuine political pull in the South and nearby regions. As National Memo editor-in-chief Joe Conason once reported, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft also had ties to the CCC’s then-leader, the late Gordon Baum, when Ashcroft was a U.S. senator.

In 1992, then-U.S. senator (and future Senate majority leader) Trent Lott (R-MS) delivered a keynote speech to a gathering of the group in his home state of Mississippi. “We need more meetings like this across the nation,” Lott told them. “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries.”

When this news surfaced in 1998, Lott disavowed having any “firsthand knowledge” about what the group stood for, and his office said he rejected their views.

And in 2001, then-Louisiana state Rep. Tony Perkins (R) — now head of the religious-right Family Research Council — also spoke at a CCC meeting. He subsequently claimed he could not remember speaking at the event.

Missouri Burning: Why Ferguson’s Inferno Is No Surprise

Missouri Burning: Why Ferguson’s Inferno Is No Surprise

The past week’s unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, with its militarized and overwhelmingly white police force confronting angry and hopeless African-Americans, is not a story unique to that place or moment. Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation, and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis — or even worse.

But beneath the familiar narrative there is a deeper history that reflects the unfinished agenda of race relations  – and the persistence of poisonous prejudice that has never been fully cleansed from the American mainstream.

For decades, Missouri has spawned or attracted many of the nation’s most virulent racists, including neo-Nazis and the remnants of the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan. Associated with violent criminality and crackpot religious extremism, these fringe groups could never wield much influence in the post-civil rights era. Beyond those marginalized outfits, however, exists another white supremacist group whose leaders have long enjoyed the patronage of right-wing Republican politicians.

The Council of Conservative Citizens, headquartered in St. Louis, is a living legacy of Southern “white resistance” to desegregation, with historical roots in the so-called “citizens’ councils” that sprung up during the 1950s as a “respectable” adjunct to the Klan. Its website currently proclaims that the CCC is “the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights!” What that means, more specifically, is promoting hatred of blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Latino immigrants, while extolling the virtues of the “Southern way of life,” the Confederacy, and even slavery.

The group’s website goes on to brag that the CCC is the only group promoting “white rights” whose meetings regularly feature “numerous elected officials, important authors, talk-show hosts, active pastors, and other important people” as speakers.

Although that boast may be exaggerated, it isn’t hollow. Founded in 1985 by the ax handle-wielding Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox and a group of white activists, the CCC remained obscure to most Americans until 1998, when media exposure of its ties to prominent congressional Republicans led to the resignation of Mississippi senator Trent Lott as Majority Leader. Six years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group monitoring racist activity in the United States, reported that the CCC had hosted as many as 38 federal, state, and local officials at its meetings (all of them Republicans except one Democrat) – despite a warning from the Republican National Committee against associating with the hate group.

Over the years, the CCC’s friends in high places included such figures as former Missouri senator John Ashcroft, who shared much of the CCC agenda as governor, when he opposed “forced desegregation” of St. Louis schools – along with the CCC members who served on the city’s school board. When President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, the CCC openly celebrated, declaring in its newsletter that “Our Ship Has Come In.”

Recently, many fewer Republican officials have been willing to associate in public with the CCC’s racist leaders. Then again, however, Ashcroft himself tended to meet secretly with those same bigots, while outwardly shunning them. When asked about his connections with the group during his confirmation hearings in 2001, he swore that he had no inkling of its racist and anti-Semitic propaganda – a very implausible excuse given the CCC’s prominence in St. Louis while he served as governor.

Despite the CCC’s presence, Missouri is home to many fine and decent people, of course – but malignant traces of the group, and the racial animus it represents, have spread far beyond the state’s borders. The most obvious example is Rush Limbaugh, the “conservative” cultural phenomenon who grew up south of St. Louis in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and who has earned a reputation as a racial agitator over many years on talk radio, where he began by doing mocking bits in “black” dialect.

In 1998, the talk jock defended Trent Lott when other conservatives were demanding his resignation over the politician’s CCC connection. Today, Limbaugh echoes the CCC line on the Brown killing, which suggests coldly that the unarmed teenager deserved his fate because he may have been a suspect in shoplifting or smoked marijuana. Why would a young man’s life be worth less than a box of cigars? Back in Rush’s home state, the answer is all too obvious.

Photo: Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT

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