Confederate Flag Raises Controversy Outside Mass. High School

[struggle4progress]

By Michael Rosenfield

A Confederate flag on private property next to the football field at Walpole High School in Massachusetts has irked many in the school community for years ...

The flag, which the school has mostly blocked by erecting a banner, was put up by a Walpole High graduate several years ago. He's now very sick, according to his wife, who says they have no plans to remove it.

"I think because it's a matter of principle, our freedom to protect our First Amendment rights," she said over the phone.

"It's still there. It's hard not to get angry at seeing it. It's a disgusting sight," said parent Ron Wilkes. I get angry at the fact that this is what others in other towns and other communities see us as, and there's no getting around that" ...

http://www.necn.com/news/new-england/Confederate-Flag-Raises-Controversy-Outside-Mass-High-School-323171821.html

[KamaAina]

1. Well, that is southeast Massachusetts, after all.

[struggle4progress]

4. Massachusetts, where the courts abolished slavery before Washington's victory at Yorktown!

Massachusetts, where William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, merged it with the earlier-founded Massachusetts General Colored Association, and published The Liberator!

Massachusetts, with its underground railroad stations like the Jackson Homestead and Liberty Farm!

Massachusetts, which outlawed Jim Crow train cars in the 1840s!

Massachusetts, which sent 160000 troops to fight for the Union, including the first black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry!

[olddots]

2. I went to that school

it sounds out of charactor for Walpole but there are prison guards living in the town that houses the state prison .

[friendly_iconoclast]

3. Walpole has a RW vibe in general- the flag jerk is not alone...

Non-Massholes may not be aware that certain areas of Massachusetts are actually
heavily Republican-the South Shore and Worcester County, for examples:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/07/23/slowly-but-surely-worcester-county-has-become-gop-stronghold/bm2DPimicBmI4mG1tV03YJ/story.html

Slowly but surely, Worcester County has gone Republican


By Frank Phillips Globe Staff July 24, 2015

When Representative Richard Neal arrived at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and saw the huge crowd that had turned out that summer day in 2009, he was thrilled. Wow, he thought, more than 200 people had shown up to hear his views on health care.

Those feelings lasted for about 15 seconds into his talk when an elderly woman stood up and began railing at him, egged on by hisses, boos, and raspberries from the crowd when he tried to answer her. It was the beginning of a nearly two-hour session full of rants about death panels, the “government takeover” of Medicare, and sometimes far-fetched fears about the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law the following year.

Neal, a Springfield Democrat, felt he was seeing the first explosive evidence of what was brewing at the precinct and ward levels of the towns he represented in Worcester County.

The once Democrat-dominated county — a collection of rural and suburban communities, three small cities, and the city of Worcester — is now a Republican enclave. It is the state’s epicenter for Tea Party activity. Some of the most conservative groups in the state GOP, many of them renegade competitors to the party establishment in Boston, are based in the county.

[BeeBee]

5. "He's now very sick."

If you ask me, he was very sick when he put it up.

"I think because it's a matter of principle, our freedom to protect our First Amendment rights," she said over the phone.

Put up a treasonous flag to protect our First Amendment rights? We must be living in Bizarro World.