The Civil War has ended where it began

Maria Calef holds a sign in front of the Confederate monument outside the South Carolina State House in Columbia after the state House voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the State Capitol on Thursday.(Stephen B. Morton/The New York Times)
Maria Calef holds a sign in front of the Confederate monument outside the South Carolina State House in Columbia after the state House voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the State Capitol on Thursday.(Stephen B. Morton/The New York Times)

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Greeson: Put up your Dukes and move to real issues

South Carolina deserves great respect.

Its lawmakers in votes Tuesday and Thursday to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds reversed decades - centuries - of hate, some deliberate and some simply blinded by custom.

"It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of, a day that truly brings us all together as we continue to heal, as one people and one state," said Gov. Nikki R. Haley in a statement after the vote which followed 15 hours of debate over 25 amendments aimed at stopping or stalling the final result.

Today at 10 a.m. the flag will come down and be moved to the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum near the Capitol.

The move is appropriate. The flag is a part of our history - the nation's as well as the South's. But as much as it is revered by some of the descendants of Confederate soldiers, it also is offensive to a great percentage of Americans whose ancestors were slaves or defenders of the United States of America's "union" and original Constitution.

Over the weeks since the June 17 massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and the revelation that the shooter was a white supremacist whose photos with the Confederate flag were flashed across the Internet, America - and particularly the South - has grappled with the question of whether the battle flag is history or a hate symbol.

Harvey S. Peeler Jr., South Carolina Senate majority leader, sees only history.

"To remove the flag from the State House grounds and thinking it would change history would be like removing a tattoo from the corpse of a loved one and thinking that would change the loved one's obituary," he said. "That won't change history. Moving the flag won't change history."

What he and others are missing, of course, is that no one is trying to change history. It's the present that is important. This change is needed now for our present and our future.

This anguishing evolution - fraught with confusion - is echoing throughout the country. Anger seethed Thursday in Washington, D.C., shouting matches over House of Representatives' bills and amendments delineating if and how Confederate flags can be displayed in federally run cemeteries and military parks.

It's complicated. Even with racial and civil rights breakthroughs, reshaping our past to mold our future picks at the fabric of how so many of us were raised. We live in communities rebuilt after Sherman's March to the Sea. We were educated in schools bearing Robert E. Lee's name or the names of other Southern fighters. So it not just as simple as asking if the Confederate flag and respect of it is a matter of history or is racist.

On the other hand, the battle flag, since the war, has been hijacked repeatedly by both racists and even nonracist politicians of all stripes who used the flag as a way to imply their closeness to voters on rural back roads - the same ordinary and not-racist folks who played on teams dubbed the "Rebels" and were educated in integrated schools named for Confederates.

In Georgia this week, one of those ordinary Southerners, Danny Hutcheson, the Haralson County coroner and the owner of Hutcheson's Memorial Chapel and Crematory, talked to The New York Times in one of his rooms decorated with political and historical memorabilia, including a picture of an ancestor who, according to family legend, was robbed of his cattle by Yankee soldiers during the Civil War. He told the reporter he does not display the Confederate flag for fear of upsetting his black friends and clients. But he defends those who do.

"We've got a cross in our church," Hutcheson said. "The Ku Klux Klan burns crosses in people's yards. Does that mean we should take the crosses out of our churches?"

Again, it is so easy for us as a people to confuse sentiment with reason. What we display and accept in churches, as in museums and front yards, is a matter of freedom of choice. But public buildings like statehouses and courthouses are shared locations that belong to all of us. All Americans. And, for what it's worth, our nation's forefathers didn't think crosses belonged in statehouses and courthouses, either.

The bottom line is that whatever the Confederate flag once represented to people who fought for a way of life they considered normal, it has changed over time and no longer represents that once-romanticized heritage. It's been hijacked and used to build the hateful heritage that now roils us again as it did during the Civil War when it defended the South's economic need - slavery.

This week, South Carolina grew beyond the confusion of old and recent history, beyond the confusion of romanticized respect vs. racial and class hate. The state where the Civil War began finally put a nail in the Civil War coffin.

Well done.

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