A group of blacks has urged that South Carolina be boycotted because it is the last state whose government flies the Confederate battle flag from its capitol building.
Perhaps not unpredictably, they have been depicted as a group of horrible, bilious Negroes trying to impose their version of political correctness on a beleaguered majority. They now join the company of Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill., who last year persuaded the Senate not to renew an official government patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia which contained the symbol of the Confederate battle flag.
Latter-day sympathizers with the Confederacy wrote disgruntled letters to the editor. The tone of the missives suggested they felt Senator Braun was comfortably wedged on the morality scale a few notches above anti-Christ and just a couple below ax murderers. Their dudgeon was puzzling. They were on the losing side of that issue, but it's a position they should be used to -- considering the fanatical devotion they show to a country that got its brains beaten out 129 years ago.
But the sympathizers seem to have support. A Louis Harris poll showed that ''American adults -- by a ratio of 3 to 1 -- see no reason to remove the Confederate emblem from state flags in the South. . . . Well over two-thirds of black Americans see nothing personally offensive in the states' use of the Confederate flag.''
The figures should make you wonder exactly which black Americans these pollsters talked to. No one from the Louis Harris poll ever asked me anything, but I can give several reasons for objecting to the Confederate flag. Not the least of them was given by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy who minced no words in describing what his country stood for:
''Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [to the idea that all men are created equal]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.''
So the Confederate government was one dedicated to white supremacy. Any flag representing that government symbolizes white supremacy. All the claims given by Confederate sympathizers that secession was inspired by the noble goals of freedom and independence do not erase Mr. Stephens' words from history.
