Ford, Carlton: It’s time for SC, South to honor our common history

As native South Carolinians and historians of South Carolina and the American South, the sentence we both most appreciated in President Obama’s moving eulogy for the Rev. Sen. Clementa Pinckney was one he borrowed from Rev. Pinckney himself: “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history — we haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.”

In mulling over that sentence, it put us in mind of all the ways in which our understanding of our history has been crippled by our failure to recognize the story of South Carolina, and the South, as a story common to all of us.

When people defend the display of the Confederate battle flag in a public place of honor as a representation of the state’s history or as an expression of state or Southern pride, they are denying that we have a common history. In doing so, they effectively mutilate that history.

Reconciling flying the Confederate battle flag with our common history requires weaving a tangled web of denials about it: that its origins had nothing to do with a defense of slavery and, more pertinently, that it did not re-emerge in the post-World War II era as a symbolic defense of white supremacy and white resistance to the modern civil rights movement. Indeed, the current era of flag flying did not even begin until the 1960s — as the direct action phase of the civil rights movement hit full stride.

Yes, the flag as a symbol can, and does, mean many things to many people. Yes, too, the Stars and Stripes is hardly unsullied; indeed, for the better part of a century it was the symbolic embodiment of the most powerful slaveholders’ republic the world has ever known, and that republic entered the war with no higher aim than to forcibly keep the South in. But in the course of the fiery trial that was the Civil War, emancipation evolved into a war aim, and the dross of slavery in the Stars and Stripes was consumed and the gold of freedom refined.

Yet the battle flag survived as a symbol for the white South, and the white South only — and symbols should unite rather than divide. South Carolinians have such a symbol now: the Palmetto flag, the most beautiful of all the state flags, hearkening back to a Revolutionary heritage dedicated to the proposition (however misunderstood at the time) that all of us are created equal.

Since the unspeakable horror at Mother Emanuel, we have seen a most amazing display of mutual solidarity among South Carolinians.

The slung smooth stone of forgiveness hurled by the families of the victims and the congregation of Emanuel A.M.E. Church stopped the Goliath of racism and hatred in its tracks and aroused a sense of unity and compassion among South Carolinians that has been inspiring to us all. It has given us all a glimpse of what the spirit of a new community in South Carolina might look like: one reaching across the divides of race, party, denominations, faith traditions, generations — indeed, across all divides — to nurture a full sense of community, of common humanity, throughout a diverse population. It might even give rise to a new community that could serve as a model to the nation.

Let us remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds and move it to the appropriate museum to mark the moment of this new community and recognition of our common history. Let undeserved grace continue to lead us home from this terrible tragedy, and let all South Carolinians, and all Southerners, respond to that grace with works of reconciliation.

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 7:33 PM with the headline "Ford, Carlton: It’s time for SC, South to honor our common history."