Fight for national identity persists
By Patrik Jonsson
JULY 31, 2015
The placing of four Confederate flags next to a US civil rights landmark in Atlanta ... represented a stick-in-the-eye strategy fomented by some Southerners, suggesting that a fight for the future of the country, and its symbolic identity, is not over ...
“What you have here is a battle for history and how we remember history, but also a battle for where the country is going or seems to be going,” says Harcourt Fuller, a history professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “It’s a continuation of the Civil War, which has not really ended culturally. The battle flag represents that fact more than any other symbol” ...
“It’s fascinating that we’ve gone from nobody talking about the Confederate flag to all of a sudden, it’s become the issue,” says Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, in an interview with the Monitor. “This will be in the history books in 100 years, because it crystallizes 50 years of antigovernment rhetoric by movement conservatives” ...
“This is not just about a flag,” Professor Richardson told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently. “This is not just about race. This is about America, who is going to control America.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0731/With-Confederate-flags-at-MLK-church-fight-for-national-identity-persists
= new reply since forum marked as read
