Thursday letters: Confederate flag always accompanied attacks on my family

I am a 60-year-old African-American woman, which makes me a member of what I call the last Jim Crow generation. I have seen some of the very worst of times in Southern race relations. As a 7-year-old, I was in the car with my father, a civil rights leader, when he was shot after a court hearing just because he was trying to obtain the right to vote. For the next four years, the threatening phone calls, the cross burnings and the intimidation were so great that every night I’d pray the same prayer: “Lord if this is the night that they come to kill me, please take me into your kingdom.”

Because of the circles in which my father moved, I was exposed to much ugliness, to too many people who thought and behaved like Dylann Roof and who had one thing in common: It seemed to me that every horrific thing that was done, every beating, every lynching, every disrespectful thing was accompanied by the Confederate flag.

We, the generation traumatized by the flag, are not dead. When we see our state legislators defend its presence, it connects with a place of pain that one would have thought long buried, and it creates fear that our past will become our children’s and our grandchildren’s future. What does it say about our legislators’ humanity if they can know the truth and still be proud of the flag’s history, and even more, what does it say about what they think of my humanity?

Goose Creek

This story was originally published July 8, 2015 at 7:08 PM with the headline "Thursday letters: Confederate flag always accompanied attacks on my family."