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CLARENCE PAGE: History lives in my neighborhood. We live near old Fort
Stevens, a civil war battle site, partly reconstructed by a federal
jobs program during the Depression. Now the majestic ramparts, parapets,
and cast-iron cannon bear silent witness to a stormy past that lives
on, with bracing resilience in our national memory. I bring my son here.
We talk about how President Lincoln stood here, tall and proud and was
fired upon. We talk about how the Union turned back the forces of Confederate
General Jubal Early, here at the edge of the nation's capitol. My son
tries to simplify the story. He wants to know, "who are the good
guys? Who are the bad guys?" Like so many children's questions,
it is simply stated, yet infinitely profound.
I make it personal. I remind him that the American experience is our
family's experience. Our ancestors were slaves in Alabama during the
war between the states. "Which side," I ask, "do you
think they were rooting for?" William Faulkner once wrote that
"the past is not dead. It's not even past." With that, Faulkner
captured the tragic spirit of the South, and not only the South. The
past haunts America's present, its powerful symbols have become a Rorschach
Test, in which one sees the history one wants to see. Is the Confederate
battle flag, for example, a symbol of racism, a benign tribute to honor
the past, or a visible wish to turn back the clock?
GEORGE WALLACE: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and
segregation forever.
(Cheers)
CLARENCE PAGE: Most Southern states didn't start flying it over public
buildings until the 1950's and 60's, when the modern civil rights era
began. Southern defiance against Washington became, by connection, a
defense of racial segregation. That too, must be remembered. A century
and a half after the Civil War, Americans still play capture the flag,
as we try to capture history. On one side, there is the cult of the
lost cause, or what's left of it. It's an ancient movement to portray
the southern cause as a noble crusade to preserve state sovereignty
against betrayal by Lincoln. Lincoln too, has become a symbol as powerful
and controversial as the flag, even among historians. Was he the great
emancipator or was he as racist as the conventional wisdom of those
times? Or was he both?
Even Ebony Magazine's historian, Lerone Bennett, argues
in his latest book, "Forced into Glory," that Lincoln really
had no intention to free the slaves. In this effort to claim another
piece of history for ourselves, the descendants of slavery share an
irony with the descendants of the confederacy. If we can reduce Lincoln's
role, we can claim a greater role in our own liberation. The conflict
over the southern flag is a struggle between two of history's losing
sides, two sides ironically chained together by our shared history.
Each of us shares an ironic resentment toward the other, and anyone
else who refuses to see our side of history.
History, it has been said, is written by the winners. That's a cynical
way to say that one's own version of history has been somehow lost,
stolen, or strayed. Battles about history are not really about the past.
They are about the future, and whose story is to be told by our children
to their children. Over time, the battle flag's attraction appears to
be fading. More Confederate descendants are standing up, like Senator
John McCain did, to say that their ancestors fought nobly, but on the
wrong side of history. A new South is emerging, slowly displacing the
old, and taking its place in a rapidly changing world. Even the land
of sweet sorghum and magnolias, where the past is not even past, the
future is beginning to happen. As the new South emerges from its bitter
past, so does America.
I'm Clarence Page.
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