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As rebels yell, few listening

By DIANE ROBERTS Special to the Times
Published April 18, 2007

TALLAHASSEE - The young gents have put up a stockade, rough pine staves 10 feet high, all the way around the white-columned mansion on College Avenue. It's for Old South, the Kappa Alphas' annual sword-toting, belle-escorting, Battle Flag- waving party. They've got a couple of cannon in there, too.

In case the Yankees decide to reinvade the Southland.

Up the hill, in the Mary Brogan Museum's "AfroProvocations" exhibition, the Confederate battle flag has been given an extreme makeover, rendered in pink satin, sequins and feathers. Another one, entitled Bondage Flag, is in black leather and chains. A traditional version of the flag droops from a noose on a full-sized wooden gallows. The title of the piece by Sarasota-based artist John Sims is The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag.

In case you thought the Old South past was dead - or even past.

Sims' work has unleashed the Furies of what has been called the "unfinished war." Robert Hurst, public relations director for the Florida Sons of Confederate Veterans, has called it an "abomination." The Sons demand that the Sims pieces be removed. The "Forget, Hell!" fraternity hollered all over the blogosphere. Anonymous callers threatened to come and tear the art show down.

The battle flag, in all its divisiveness, is still with us. Which is, of course, John Sims' point. At a fraught museum board meeting on March 26, Chucha Barber, executive director of the Brogan, was inclined to stroke the ruffled feathers of the SCV and their fellow travelers. In an op-ed piece for the Tallahassee Democrat she had promised to add "a most respectful history of the Confederate Flag" to the exhibit. Evidently there would be no mention of slavery, the klan or the flag's long afterlife as the banner of choice for racists from Coeur d'Alene to Cologne.

The Brogan board, to its credit, didn't think that was a good idea. One member, a former county school superintendent who'd had run-ins with the SCV, said, "You take one step back, you're going to get your tail whipped." Director of art exhibitions Cynthia Hollis, who had put "AfroProvocations" together, argued against trying to mollify "a group that first demands we remove work from the walls of the museum and then mounts a campaign of hate mail, hate e-mail and hate phone calls."

So the "AfroProvocations" show speaks for itself, unadulterated by any attempt to suck up to a bunch of ancestor worshipers. You could argue that Confederate apologists are at a considerable advantage anyway. One of Florida's more embarrassing statutes (256.10 if you want to look it up), still on the books, prohibits the "mutilation, defacing, and defiling" of any Confederate flag. It's also unlawful to "cast contempt upon the flags of the Confederacy."

Yet contempt is precisely what should be cast upon the battle flag. The SCV and other neo-Confeds claim they're all about "Heritage, Not Hate." But the flag's heritage is hatred - hatred, violence, injustice. It's an irredeemable symbol; it cannot be rehabilitated. However brave individual Confederates may have been, however noble they believed their cause to be, their society was predicated on the barbaric institution of slavery.

Nonetheless, the SCV is lobbying the Legislature for a Confederate flag license plate. So far, the bill is going nowhere. And despite fears that legislators might use the "AfroProvocations" show as an excuse to cut funding for museums, according to Malinda Horton, with the Florida Association of Museums, there haven't even been rumblings of outrage.

The battle flag will never completely go away: the Kappa Alphas have to fly something over their fort. But this year, 2007, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Lee, maybe all Southerners should take to heart what Lee told his die-hard Confederate officers: "Abandon your animosities and make your sons Americans."

Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, teaches English and writing at Florida State University.

[Last modified April 17, 2007, 21:28:12]