Let Confederate emblem on Mississippi flag go
Otis W. Pickett,
9:07 a.m. CDT April 8, 2016
... If there is anyone in Mississippi who can claim a Confederate heritage and a reason to celebrate it for a month, it’s me. I grew up on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor, just a few hundred yards away from where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. I grew up inundated with stories of direct descendants on both sides of my family who served in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia ...
Just as the apostle Paul once delighted in being a “Pharisee of Pharisees,” along with his ethnic heritage and his education, I too delighted in my heritage, was proud of it and boasted about it. Like Paul, I had a Damascus road experience with the centrality of my heritage, ancestry and education to my identity. This was through the Gospel of Christ doing a changing work in me, through the study of history, and through the love and friendship of African-American brothers and sisters. Christ had become my identity and, like Paul, I began to feel, “far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”
Christ and his Gospel were made known to me through the work of the Holy Spirit in an African-American Baptist minister in Charleston, South Carolina, named the Rev. Herman Robinson. Herman discipled me in Christ, he preached to me and he was my pastor. We were friends. I ate in his home. He ate at ours. He and I loved each other and still do. He grieved with me when my grandfather passed away. When I was in college, Herman would drive up once a year to visit me, pray over my room and take me to lunch. I will never forget the day he came into my room and saw the first national flag of the Confederacy hanging on my wall next to a picture of Gen. Pickett. I remember looking at Herman’s face and seeing a contorted combination of sadness and disbelief. His eyes were watery — yet he didn’t say anything. This was the day I learned that not all people view emblems of the Confederacy in the same way I did.
I had deeply hurt my best friend. At my wedding, Herman was gracious enough to attend, and he presented me with a picture of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy kneeling in prayer on the streets in Birmingham. The underlying message was, “Let images like this decorate your new home.” I called him the day of the shooting at Emmanuel AME Church by a young, white South Carolinian who had become infatuated with everything the Confederate flag had come to resemble. We wept together ...
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/life/faith/2016/04/07/my-faith-let-confederate-emblem-mississippi-flag-go/82722980/
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Nor does their opinion about whether the sun circles the earth, or whether it is the other way round, have any bearing on their lives
