On June 21st, four days after a terrorist attack on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, red graffiti reading “BLACK LIVES MATTER” appeared on the base of a confederate memorial.
A few hours later several white men covered the graffiti and the base of the statue with a blue tarp. One of those who covered the graffiti was Zachary Gaither who he “was covering up something that was demoting our city...the Confederate flag is a Southern heritage of pride to me.”
These layers are our politics played out in public space: first a statue is erected to honor the civil war, then adorned by graffiti decrying the murder of the Charleston 9 and lifting up the lives of black people, which is in turn covered by a tarp to preserve the original intent of the statue and its racist heritage.
The statue was erected in 1932 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. A crowd of thousands (many with fathers or grandfathers for whom the statue would stand) gathered for the unveiling in honor of those who defended Fort Sumter in what many call “the Confederate War.”
South Carolina was the first state to secede following Abraham Lincoln’s election. The civil war began in South Carolina when confederates attacked Fort Sumter in an attempt to oust the US Army. Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes South Carolina’s Casus Belli:
...A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
The confederate flag, still flying high in front of Charleston’s city hall, is a symbol of the Civil War, waged to protect the South’s material interest in slavery. Confederate memorials and streets named for confederate soldiers are common across the nation. We continue to build more to this day (see this example being built in Orange, Texas). Calls have been made to take down the flag, and throughout the South the call is being answered. Apple has removed a video game featuring the flag and Walmart, eBay, Sears and Amazon are to stop selling the flag from stores and websites. Taking down the flag is necessary symbolic step. The flag and its ilk celebrate a white supremacist heritage and history that permeates the US (not just the south, of course).
However, as Adele Stan writes for the American Prospect, taking down the confederate flag is easy, and eradicating racism is hard. The star-spangled banner is, in the end, just as tainted by racism as the confederate flag. In order to recognize that #blacklivesmatter in the United States, we have to interrogate and overturn the racist laws, policies, and practices that our country endorses at every turn.
