The real battle line of the battle flag

Two years ago, Paul Harvison got into a fistfight at a truck stop with a black man because of the Confederate flag Harvison had on his front license plate.
He was refueling his rig at a truck stop in Tuskegee, Ala. “He called me a redneck,” Harvison says. “Well, I am a redneck.”
To Harvison, the Confederate flag is worth fighting over. It represents a code Southerners hold sacred, he says. “Freedom, heritage, a symbol of the South — that’s what it’s all about.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” says his wife, Tammy. They’re waiting at the Travel Center of America truck stop, just off Moreland Avenue at I-285, as crews load up a new trailer for them to haul. They’ll be in Tampa, Fla., later in the day, and then they’ll make a run to Houston, Texas.
Both Harvisons are in their mid-20s. Paul wears a No Fear baseball cap criss-crossed with the Confederate flag. They’re playing video games to kill time.
“Most of the people who have a problem with the flag don’t know about its history,” he says. “Anybody who doesn’t like the Rebel flag can go back north.”
Tammy says black lawmakers and groups like the NAACP want to change the Georgia flag to “get revenge for oppression” they suffered in the past. “It feels they are going to try to take everything from us because we took so much from them.”
“It’s kind of like the way they wanted to put Ebonics in the schools,” Paul says.
“They are too lazy to learn the way we talk,” Tammy says.
“Why change the way we are, the way we live for them?”
“They eventually are going to run this country.”
Paul says he’s going to paint his motorcycle in the colors and design of the Confederate flag.
“You better not,” Tammy adds. “You know you are going to get shot at if you do.”
Andy Brown of Register, Ga., had the Rebel flag on the license plate of his last rig. He hasn’t had time to attach the Rebel flag to his new truck yet; he just joined a new company earlier this week. But he will, he says, when he has time.
People called him a racist for it dozens of times over the years, he says. “I’m not a racist. They think it’s racism but that’s not what it’s about.”
“It’s a symbol of Georgia to me,” Brown says. “Some people might use it for racist [things]. The KKK did, and they are wrong for that. Because of them people automatically think it’s racist.”
Brown says lawmakers should not change the flag just because some people are offended by it.
“That doesn’t make sense because, like my daddy used to tell me, you can’t please everyone all the time,” he says. “Changing it will just score points for the NAACP. It’ll make them out to be winners but it’s not going to change how people feel. For racist people, changing it might make them even more racist. It might make matters worse.”
Wayne Smith, 55, plays the video slot machines at the truck stop while mechanics install a new clutch in his truck. He’s been hauling freight up and down the East Coast for more than 20 years. Today, he dropped off a load of newspaper inserts and magazines.
“I’d rather see the flag stay exactly the way it is,” he says. “Other states had the flag taken down, and I don’t think that’s right. I grew up 30 miles from here, and I was raised to believe in that flag my whole life.”
What does it mean to believe in the Confederate flag? “It means history and the South,” he answers.
What does the South mean? “Now that’s hard to explain,” he says. He says, “You’d have to write a whole book if you wanted to explain what the South means to me.”
Feelings about the Confederate flag run deep in this truck stop, where white truckers eat at the Country Pride restaurant, and most black truckers seem to congregate in the adjacent Popeye’s.
Feelings about the flag are just as strong at Styles by Toya, a hair salon in the East Atlanta Village, just off Moreland, seven miles north and a world away from the Travel Center of America truck stop.
It didn’t take much prodding to get hair stylist Augusta Starling to talk about the controversial effort to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag of Georgia. She talks candidly about it as she massages shampoo into Toya Clark’s hair. Clark, who opened the salon seven years ago, quickly joins the conversation.
Early in her schooling, Starling had no problems pledging allegiance to the American flag and the Georgia flag hoisted next to it, she says. Then she got to high school.
“Before then, I never knew my grandparents were enslaved, I just thought there were poor people and rich people,” Starling says. “By the time I got to high school I knew the history. I didn’t know until then that it signified racism, that they were fighting for the right to own slaves.” And she hasn’t saluted the flag since. She is now in her late 30s.
“I can’t understand why they don’t want to use a flag that unites the state, instead of using a symbol that appeals to one part of the population, and deeply offends another part of the population,” Starling says.
She says state lawmakers like Rep. Calvin Smyre and Sen. Charles Walker will have a hard time trying to convince their fellow legislators to change the flag, simply because most Georgians, especially rural whites, want to keep the Confederate flag flying high.
“I hope the reason is its history,” as to why lawmakers want to keep the flag the way it is. “At least I hope that’s the reason.”
She knows there could be another reason, a more sinister, underlying philosophy that could keep the flag from being changed: some white people stubbornly see the flag issue as a chance for a “win,” she says.
It’s possible whites simply don’t want to make more concessions to blacks than they already have. They may be tired of losing their so-called Southern way of life, she says. Keeping the flag the same would be an accomplishment worth celebrating, she says, a victory for some white folks.
“They fight for the flag and we fight against it. Why is it about that? That’s what I want to know,” Clark adds.
“You don’t have to invite me into your house but the flag is out in public,” Starling says. “It’s in places for every one of us to see.”
As much as she dislikes the flag, Starling would rather see real progress in race relations than fight a battle where no one will really wins.
“There are still certain places where you are looked at differently. There are certain restaurants you go to where you just don’t feel comfortable,” she says.
White folks go out of their way to avoid getting too close to her and her family when they go to Lenox Mall and Phipps Plaza. That’s the root of the problem, she says.
Starling’s 12-year-old daughter sees the Georgia flag with its Confederate emblem at school, and Starling would like to change that. It’s not a symbol she wants to be imprinted in her daughter’s mind every weekday.
“I was shocked when she came home from school and told me that one day it might be possible for there to be a black woman president, but never a black man president. I’d never thought of that before, but she is absolutely right.”
Overcoming that obstacle, she says — now that would be real progress.