Student's heritage lacks Southern air
But flag's history is certain
By Alisa Tang
atang@bnd.com


The student who brandished the Confederate flag on campus and a sign that read ``Heritage not hate'' was hard-pressed to explain what heritage he was backing.

Jason Scott, a senior at Belleville Township High School East, said he stands by the symbol because of his interest in the Civil War and the South. He said that a school administrator told him the flag stood for slavery, but he claims he would not support the flag if it that were true.

However, American history specialists say the Confederate flag and the Civil War cannot be separated from the issue of slavery.

Jason, 17, on Wednesday held a Confederate flag next to the flag pole in the school courtyard Wednesday morning in protest of a new rule banning the display of Confederate flags on cars in his shop class.

He was suspended for eight days for defying school authority.

The ``Heritage not hate'' sign he held caused confusion among students -- black and white -- about what the Confederate flag means.

The slogan has been widely used by Southerners, including legislators in South Carolina, as they fought in support of the Confederate flag on their Statehouse.

Jason said he doesn't have relatives in or from the South that he knows well, but he does have an aunt and uncle in the South he doesn't know well. ``It's a part of everybody's heritage -- everyone that has had family here since the 1860s,'' Jason said.

The state of Illinois backed the North during the war.

But Wayne Fields, the director of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, said, ``My guess is that this heritage is not of the war, that it is of the (Ku Klux) Klan. All this goes back to the romanticized version of the defeated South, which stems back to the Depression, and which is what some people think is Southern history.''

During the Civil War the Confederate flag ``seemed to be only about race,'' Fields said.

``Nobody at the time was concerned about heritage. They said they didn't want integration. It stands for a secessionist cause in the war with the United States and at a later day, an anti-integrationist movement, where the sole focus seemed to be race.''

Thomas Curran, assistant professor of history at St. Louis University, said the flag was created only because of the Civil War. ``No matter how you look at it, the Civil War came about because of issues surrounding slavery, and one side did want to protect that institution, and that was the Confederacy, who this flag stood for,'' Curran said.

People who see it as a symbol of heritage ``see it as part of a broader Southern heritage before the Civil War, but that was a white-dominated South that condoned the use of slaves,'' he said.

Curran said the flag does have different meanings to different people.

About 800,000 people fought and died for the Confederacy, he said. ``The reasons many young men went off to fight often were divorced from slavery,'' Curran said. ``They went to fight to protect themselves, their homelands and their families from outsiders, or what they saw as an invading Northern army; and also to prove their manhood, to seek adventure.

``Many just see it as something that represents rebelliousness in the generic sense,'' Curran said of the Confederate flag. ``In the 1860s, the South rebelled against the authority of the federal government. Many people who see themselves as rebels embrace the flag for that reason, not because of slavery.''

Still, he said, ``I look at this as a historian, not just someone looking for a symbol. The only reason that flag came into existence was because of a war to protect slavery. It's very difficult to take away that meaning.''







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Published Friday, September 7, 2001, in the Belleville News-Democrat