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- <text id=93TT2057>
- <title>
- Aug. 02, 1993: Nixing Dixie
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Aug. 02, 1993 Big Shots:America's Kids and Their Guns
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- CIVIL RIGHTS, Page 30
- Nixing Dixie
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>An impassioned Senate vote focuses attention on the South's
- war of symbols
- </p>
- <p>By MICHAEL RILEY/ATLANTA--With reporting by Nancy Traver/Washington
- </p>
- <p> The United Daughters of the Confederacy had had their way with
- the Senate in the past. Four times this century the Senate had
- renewed the patent on their insignia, which includes the seven-starred
- Confederate flag--an emotional symbol that continues to divide
- blacks and whites in the South. But in May the Judiciary Committee
- decided against renewal. And when Senator Jesse Helms, a proud
- son of the South, sneaked it in as part of a larger bill, he
- learned that he wasn't the only one who felt passionately about
- the Civil War.
- </p>
- <p> The first black woman to sit in the Senate, Carol Moseley-Braun
- of Illinois, had amassed a spotty record in her first seven
- months. But she took command of the Senate floor last week as
- she demanded that the legislators reconsider their approval
- of the patent. "This vote is about race. It is about racial
- symbols, the racial past, and the single most painful episode
- in American history." Her voice shaking, she declared, "It is
- absolutely unacceptable to me and to millions of Americans,
- black or white, that we would put the imprimatur of the United
- States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea." The Senate,
- busy on other matters, stopped to listen, and a lengthy debate
- ensued, with Southern Senators arguing for their nostalgia and
- heritage against Moseley-Braun's eloquent indignation. In the
- end, 27 Senators reversed themselves. The patent was not renewed.
- </p>
- <p> The showdown in the U.S. Senate was just the most dramatic incident
- in a war against symbols that continues to haunt the South.
- The Confederate battle flag flew atop Alabama's capitol until
- a few months ago. Blacks in Mississippi are suing to remove
- the same emblem from their state flag. Georgia Governor Zell
- Miller's proposal to "purge the dark side of the Confederacy"--again the battle emblem--from that state flag failed earlier
- this year.
- </p>
- <p> Other reminders have ended up on history's dustheap. In New
- Orleans, for example, Jefferson Davis Elementary has become
- Ernest N. Morial Elementary, named after the city's first black
- mayor. Two weeks ago, the New Orleans City Council voted to
- dismantle the Liberty Monument, a granite obelisk to white supremacy.
- The Ole Miss faculty in Oxford, Mississippi, passed a resolution
- seeking to end the playing of Dixie at school events. In Memphis,
- Tennessee, black activists may soon try to remove from a city
- park the bronze statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the
- first Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
- </p>
- <p> Some whites fear that soon all Confederate monuments, cemeteries
- and even Georgia's Stone Mountain, with its huge granite memorials
- to Confederate heroes, will vanish. "Our culture is being eradicated,"
- says Charles Lunsford, spokesman for the Sons of Confederate
- Veterans. "When somebody declares war against your culture,"
- he adds, "they're either going to back off or they're going
- to have a war."
- </p>
- <p> "It's sort of like we've been labeled racists," said Tommie
- Phillips LaCavera, president general of the United Daughters
- of the Confederacy. "This is something our ancestors did over
- 100 years ago, and we're being punished for what they did. It
- has nothing to do with us." Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama
- could empathize with LaCavera: his family tree includes a grandfather
- who served as a Confederate surgeon and a signatory to Alabama's
- order of secession from the Union. But Heflin changed his vote
- and sided with Moseley-Braun last week. His forebears "might
- be spinning in their graves," he said, but "we must get racism
- behind us. We must move forward. We must realize we live in
- America today."
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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