Perspective: Will Georgia decide to raise a new flag over its future?

HOMER, Ga. -- On a holiday visit to my hometown, I drove past the school I attended in the late '50s and early '60s and let the years roll back in my mind. In the fall of 1966, when the clock finally ran out on segregated schools in the South, I was fresh out of the University of Georgia and working as an intern reporter in the Atlanta bureau of Newsweek magazine. Newsweek was planning a cover story on school desegregation in the South, and my editors thought I should go to Homer, a small town in the state's rural backwaters, to see how things went on the first day of school.

I dropped by the first-grade classroom just as the teacher was organizing her students, black and white, into a circle for a game of Farmer-in-the-dell. When it came time to select the "farmer" to stand in the middle of the circle, the teacher began, "Eeenie, meanie, minie, moe, catch a nig- . . . "

She caught herself and gasped, "Oh my, that won't do now." She tried again, ". . . catch a tiger by the toe."

That was the only awkward moment on a day of transition and liberation that the state's demagogic politicians had long resisted as a threat to "our way of life." There were no incidents or demonstrations. Whites did not pull their children out of the public schools. Private segregated academies did not spring up. Banks County simply accepted the inevitable and got on with other business. Integration did not come so easily to other towns and schools in Georgia, but I have always been proud that my home county did not choose defiance of the law when Monday finally arrived and the walls of school segregation came tumbling down in the states of the Old Confederacy.

At the beginning of a new millennium, when the South's ugly resistance to school desegregation seems a distant memory, I am reminded that for all the progress Georgia has made on civil rights, it still can't let go of a divisive symbol that tarnishes the state's progress in race relations and holds it emotionally captive to an ignoble past. That symbol is the Confederate battle emblem on Georgia's state flag.

Last year, after years of bitter controversy, protests and boycotts, South Carolina hauled down the Confederate battle flag that had long flown over its state capital, and the Mississippi Legislature will soon decide whether to replace the Confederate emblem on its state flag. If Mississippi legislators vote to change their state's flag, that will leave Georgia, one of the South's most progressive states -- politically, economically and racially -- as the only holdout. It is a source of embarrassment and distress for some Georgians, including native son Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, but there are few signs that the state's politicians or most of its citizens are ready to remove the Confederate emblem that was added to the state flag as an act of defiance by the Georgia Legislature in 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation.

Civil rights activists, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King III, have promised boycotts if the flag is not changed this year. Flag supporters, meanwhile, are planning rallies and an advertising campaign to defend what they say is a symbol of their Southern heritage. The state's leading Democratic politicians, including Gov. Roy Barnes, are refusing to take a position and hoping the issue will go away. And the Republicans, most of whom support keeping the flag as it is, are hoping the issue will work to their political advantage.

Barnes' predecessor as governor, Zell Miller, now the state's junior U.S. senator, is one of the few Democrats who has had the political courage to confront the issue head-on. He led an unsuccessful effort in 1993 to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the flag. Even former President Jimmy Carter declined to enlist in Miller's campaign and wondered why the governor was willing to risk his political future on the issue.

The great irony in all this is that the same Georgia politicians who are ducking the flag issue are part of a coalition that is openly defending affirmative action in the state university admissions. After a federal judge struck down the University of Georgia's policy of affirmative action in admissions, Michael Adams, the university's president, refused to give up without a fight. He is appealing the decision.

The Los Angeles Times reported recently that Gov. Barnes, the chancellor of higher education, the board of regents and even the Republican state party chairman and the GOP leader in the state Senate are backing Adams in an extraordinary display of bipartisan support for affirmative action, an issue that has become highly divisive in Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush replaced affirmative action with a One Florida plan that guarantees admission to a state university to the top 20 percent of each high school graduating class.

Georgia's defense of affirmative action is just one measure of how far the state has come under progressive political leadership. The state flag controversy, however, reminds us that the state's liberation from the past is not complete. Thirty-five years ago, that first-grade teacher in tiny Homer let go of what had been a way of life and didn't look back. Now it's time for the state's political leadership and people of goodwill to follow her example and raise a new flag over Georgia's future.

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