Tag Archives: confederate

Final Swamp Watch – 17 January 2017

by ScotHooten Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Despite weeks of effort, Donald Trump was apparently unable to find a Hispanic to serve as Secretary of Agriculture. Was this because no Hispanics were willing to join his administration? Or was it because Trump just couldn’t build any kind of personal rapport with any of the Hispanics who came to Trump Tower to visit with him? We’ll never know.

Instead, our new Agriculture Secretary will be Sonny Perdue, the man who won election as governor of Georgia in 2003 by promising to let residents vote on a flag referendum that would allow them to return the Confederate battle cross to a central position in the state flag. In the end, the Democratic legislature refused to allow this, and instead compromised on a flag that ditched the rebel cross but included the Confederate Stars and Bars—something that most people don’t really recognize, but which kinda sorta appeased the racist Southern heritage faction of the Peach State.

I’m sure this appealed to Trump, and Perdue does have some agricultural experience—that is, assuming you count the fact that he runs a “global trading company that facilitates U.S. commerce focusing on the export of U.S. goods and services…such as blueberries, grains, onions, peanuts, pecans, soybeans, and spinach.” He’s probably done pretty well for himself in this business, allowing him to join his brother, Sen. David Perdue, in the rich man’s club.

Anyway, that’s it. Until and unless someone pulls out or is rejected by the Senate, Trump has now named his nominees for every cabinet-level position. As you can see, he tangled with the swamp, and the swamp won.

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Final Swamp Watch – 17 January 2017

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Ole Miss Finally Ditches State Flag from College Campus

by LashondWillison Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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The University of Mississippi permanently lowered the state flag from its campus grounds on Monday, in a historic decision to distance itself from the flag’s controversial Confederate emblem.

The flag’s removal follows a 33-15 vote with one abstention by student senate members and faculty last week. Mississippi has been the only state to fully include the Confederate symbol in its flag.

“This is one small step in the structure change we want to see at the University,” the state’s NAACP chapter president Buka Okoye said. “I’m positive for the future because of how quickly the administration acted.”

The decision comes more than four months after a gunman opened fire inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina killing nine people. Once law enforcement officials identified the suspected gunman, photos of him embracing the Confederate flag surfaced, sparking a national debate over the emblem and its racist roots.

Weeks after the shooting, South Carolina finally removed the battle flag from flying above the statehouse grounds—more than 50 years after it was first raised to protest the civil rights movement.

Despite calls from Mississippi lawmakers, including two Republican senators, to do away with the Confederate symbol on the Mississippi state flag in the wake of the Charleston mass shooting, the move to do so likely faces an uphill battle in a state that has flown the symbol for more than a century.

“As Mississippi’s flagship university, we have a deep love and respect for our state,” the university’s interim chancellor Morris Stocks said in a statement on Monday. “Because the flag remains Mississippi’s official banner, this was a hard decision. I understand the flag represents tradition and honor to some. But to others, the flag means that some members of the Ole Miss family are not welcomed or valued.”

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Ole Miss Finally Ditches State Flag from College Campus

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George Zimmerman Posted a Photo of Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

by Bobbie07Ynuwisj Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, George Zimmerman retweeted an image of Trayvon Martin’s dead body. The image was first tweeted to him by a fan who wrote, “Z-Man is a one man army.”

After the tweet was deleted, apparently by Twitter, Zimmerman posted a tweet directing media inquiries to the phone number of a car audio shop. When I called it, a disgruntled man said it was not affiliated with Zimmerman. I asked what he meant, and he said, “It’s pretty cut and dry, dude. Do you understand English?” Then he hung up. The number, it turns out, belongs to a man Zimmerman has been waging a social media campaign against.

Twitter would not comment on why they took down the photo, but the company directed me to its policy, which states that users “may not publish or post threats of violence against others or promote violence against others.”

Previously, Zimmerman’s tweets have referred to black people as primates and “slime.”

In August, Zimmerman teamed up with the owner of a gun store with a no-Muslims-allowed policy to sell prints of his Confederate flag art, which he says “represents the hypocrisy of political correctness that is plaguing this nation.”

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George Zimmerman Posted a Photo of Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

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South Carolina Senator Rants Against Gay Marriage During Vote on Confederate Flag Removal

by Melliss69C Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a historic 37-3 vote, members of South Carolina’s Senate just voted to remove the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds. Monday’s vote followed hours of debate, with lawmakers overwhelmingly making the case to do away with the racist symbol once and for all.

Perhaps confused by the subject at hand, Sen. Lee Bright used Monday’s debate as an opportunity to voice his support in keeping the flag and dually attack the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision last month, not to mention the “abomination colors” showcased by the White House to celebrate the court’s decision.

“This nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and they are under assault by men in black robes who were not elected by you,” Bright warned.

“Our governor called us in to deal with the flag that sits out front, let’s deal with the national sin that we face today!” he continued. “We talk about abortion but this gay marriage thing, I believe will be one nation gone under like President Reagan said. If we’re not one nation under God, we’ll be one nation gone under.”

With more biblical references and anti-LGBT ranting, Bright went onto urge his fellow lawmakers to continue flying the battle flag. It was a rare moment of crazy, perhaps even for his two fellow Confederate flag supporters, who likely knew they had only one fight to lose on Monday.

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South Carolina Senator Rants Against Gay Marriage During Vote on Confederate Flag Removal

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It’s Not Just the Flags. All These Public Schools Are Named After Notorious Racists

by OuidaCarrigan Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Confederate flag is hardly the only symbol of the South’s racist history that has yet to go away. Indeed, public schools nationwide still bear the names of long-dead champions of a white-supremacist state.

The good news is that several of those schools have reconsidered their loaded names. Last year, the Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Florida, became Westside High School. Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. And Aycock Hall at Duke University, named for former North Carolina Gov. Charles Aycock, an avowed white supremacist, became East Residence Hall. This move prompted East Carolina University eight months later to rename its own Aycock Hall as Heritage Hall. Last May, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill changed Saunders Hall to Carolina Hall to shed its association with Klan leader William Saunders.

Last week, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, who formerly served as San Antonio’s mayor, posted a message on his personal Facebook page calling on that city’s North East Independent School District to rename Robert E. Lee High School. “There are other, more appropriate individuals to honor and spotlight as role models for our young people,” Castro wrote.

But scores of American schools still bear the monikers of Confederate brass. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, we put together a map of some of those schools below. It includes more than 60 schools—mostly in the South, not surprisingly—and there are undoubtedly others, between private schools and public schools, that have changed names recently in the opposite direction. And then there are the schools located on streets named for Confederate figures, such as the ironically named Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on Mosby Street in Richmond, Virginia. John Singleton Mosby, a.k.a. “the Gray Ghost,” was a Confederate colonel who reportedly wrote to a colleague, “I’ve always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about.…I’ve never heard of any other cause than slavery.

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It’s Not Just the Flags. All These Public Schools Are Named After Notorious Racists

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Bree Newsome Explains Why She Tore Down the Confederate Flag in South Carolina

by AllenDalrymple Posted on June 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, Bree Newsome, the woman who scaled the flagpole at the South Carolina statehouse on Saturday and took down the Confederate flag, made her first public comments since her arrest, which were published on the progressive website Blue Nation Review. She detailed her recent history of activism and described her motivation:

The night of the Charleston Massacre, I had a crisis of faith. The people who gathered for Bible study in Emmanuel AME Church that night—Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson and Rev. Clementa Pinckney (rest in peace)—were only doing what Christians are called to do when anyone knocks on the door of the church: invite them into fellowship and worship.

The day after the massacre I was asked what the next step was and I said I didn’t know. We’ve been here before and here we are again: black people slain simply for being black; an attack on the black church as a place of spiritual refuge and community organization.
I refuse to be ruled by fear. How can America be free and be ruled by fear? How can anyone be?

So, earlier this week I gathered with a small group of concerned citizens, both black and white, who represented various walks of life, spiritual beliefs, gender identities and sexual orientations. Like millions of others in America and around the world, including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and President Barack Obama, we felt (and still feel) that the confederate battle flag in South Carolina, hung in 1962 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, must come down. (Of course, we are not the first to demand the flag’s removal. Civil rights groups in South Carolina and nationwide have been calling for the flag’s removal since the moment it was raised, and I acknowledge their efforts in working to remove the flag over the years via the legislative process.)

We discussed it and decided to remove the flag immediately, both as an act of civil disobedience and as a demonstration of the power people have when we work together.

Explaining why she worked together with fellow activist James Ian Tyson, she continued:

Achieving this would require many roles, including someone who must volunteer to scale the pole and remove the flag. It was decided that this role should go to a black woman and that a white man should be the one to help her over the fence as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides. We made this decision because for us, this is not simply about a flag, but rather it is about abolishing the spirit of hatred and oppression in all its forms.

Read Newsome’s whole statement here.

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Bree Newsome Explains Why She Tore Down the Confederate Flag in South Carolina

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Mississippi’s Republican Senators Say the State’s Confederate Symbol Has Got to Go

by CristinTang Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update: Sen. Thad Cochran, the state’s senior senator, has joined his colleague in appealing to the state legislature to change the Mississippi flag. “it is my personal hope that the state government will consider changing its flag,” he said in a statement. The original story is below:

When Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) was asked on Sunday about removing the Confederate cross from his state’s flag, he demurred. That decision “should be up to the Mississippi legislature and the people of the state,” he argued. But 48 hours later, he has changed his mind. On Wednesday, he released a statement calling for the current incarnation of the flag to be “put in the museum” and replaced with something else:

After reflection and prayer, I now believe our state flag should be put in a museum and replaced by one that is more unifying to all Mississippians. As the descendant of several brave Americans who fought for the Confederacy, I have not viewed Mississippi’s current state flag as offensive. However, it is clearer and clearer to me that many of my fellow citizens feel differently and that our state flag increasingly portrays a false impression of our state to others.

In I Corinthians 8, the Apostle Paul said he had no personal objection to eating meat sacrificed to idols. But he went on to say that “if food is a cause of trouble to my brother, or makes my brother offend, I will give up eating meat.” The lesson from this passage leads me to conclude that the flag should be removed since it causes offense to so many of my brothers and sisters, creating dissention rather than unity.

This is an issue to be decided by the legislature and other state government officials and not dictated by Washington. If I can be part of a process to achieve consensus within our state, I would welcome the opportunity to participate.

Wicker joins the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, the nephew of former Gov. Haley Barbour, and the state’s Republican speaker of the House among other prominent Mississippians who have called for the Confederate symbol to go after the murder of nine African American parishioners at a church last week in Charleston, South Carolina.

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Mississippi’s Republican Senators Say the State’s Confederate Symbol Has Got to Go

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Watch the First Black Woman Who Served in the US Senate Go Off on the Confederate Flag

by Ernesti5796 Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

With South Carolina poised to remove the flag from its statehouse, and with momentum growing toward the removal of the Confederate emblem from state flags in Mississippi, Alabama and Virginia, the symbol’s enduring official status in the American South may finally be winding down. The current backlash against the rebel flag, sparked by the massacre of nine people inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, is the latest round in a fierce long-running debate.

On July 22, 1993, an impassioned Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois—the first African-American woman to serve in the US Senate and its sole black member at the time—took the floor to rebuke conservative legislators including the late Jesse Helms, who were backing an amendment to secure the Confederate flag as the official design for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Moseley-Braun said: “The issue is whether Americans such as myself who believe in the promise of this country, who feel strongly and who are patriots in this country, will have to suffer the indignity of being reminded time and time again that at one time in this country’s history we were human chattel. We were property. We could be traded, bought, and sold.”

She added with regard to the amendment: “On this issue there can be no consensus. It is an outrage. It is an insult.”

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Watch the First Black Woman Who Served in the US Senate Go Off on the Confederate Flag

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Here’s How Fast Politicians Are Now Fleeing From the Confederate Flag

by eric2034 Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

UPDATE 6/23/15, 3:25 p.m. ET : An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the company would pull all Confederate flag merchandise.

Within a week of the murders of nine black church congregants in Charleston, South Carolina, southern politicians and GOP presidential hopefuls have been pressured to address the continued flying of the Confederate flag. Previously justified as a symbol of Southern pride and history, the flag—and all its racist baggage—has become more difficult for prominent supporters to defend. This became increasingly clear over the weekend when a website apparently belonging to suspected shooter Dylann Roof emerged, featuring a racist screed and photos of Roof posing with white supremacist insignias and a Confederate flag license plate.

Right after the murders, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said, “It’s him, not the flag,” but by Monday afternoon, flanked by a bipartisan group at a news conference, she announced her support for the flag’s removal from state Capitol grounds. Standing next to her was Sen. Lindsey Graham, another former flag supporter. Since then it has been like Dixieland dominos, with conservative politicians, southern state leaders of all stripes, and corporations including Walmart coming forward to support the flag’s removal.

The shifting tide has been accompanied by some telling statements:

South Carolina State Rep. Norman D. Brannon

The day after the murders, Republican South Carolina State Rep. Norman “Doug” Brannon, a former Confederate flag supporter, announced plans to sponsor legislation that would have the flag removed from the state Capitol grounds. Brannon was close friends with state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, one of the victims in the church attack, which catalyzed his move to abandon the flag. “What lit a fire under this was the tragic death of my friend and his eight parishioners,” he told the New York Times last week. “It took my buddy’s death to get me to do this. I feel ashamed of myself.”

Mississippi’s Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn

Gunn was one of the first to speak out after Haley’s announcement. He took to Facebook, where he left the following message:
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We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us. As a Christian, I believe our state’s…

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

On Friday, Graham defended the south’s affinity for the Confederate flag, saying it is “part of who we are,” but by Monday he was standing with Haley opposing it. “After the tragic, hate-filled shooting in Charleston, it is only appropriate that we deal once and for all with the issue of the flag,” the senator and presidential hopeful said in a statement following his appearance behind Haley. “I hope that, by removing the flag, we can take another step toward healing and recognition—and a sign that South Carolina is moving forward.” While Graham wants to remove the flag from the Capitol grounds, that doesn’t mean he is totally against its use. In a tweet Monday, he indicated it should still be flown and not completely eliminated.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Taking to social media, the senator waited until Monday before releasing a statement on the Confederate battle flag:

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe

On Tuesday, Gov. McAuliffe took steps to ban the Confederate flag from state license plates. “Although the battle flag is not flown here on Capitol Square, it has been the subject of considerable controversy, and it divides many of our people. Even its display on state issued license tags is, in my view, unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people,” McAuliffe said in a statement. Prohibiting the flag on license plates falls in line with a a recent US Supreme Court ruling that gives states the authority to restrict certain plate designs.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

Over the weekend, Walker spoke at the Road to Majority 2015 convention, where he told the room of religious conservatives that he denounced the Charleston massacre. While he was quick to call the shooting a “racist” and “evil” act, he was uncharacteristically reticent about the Confederate flag. Walker said he predicted South Carolina would have some “good healthy debate” about the topic, but that it should be contained to “South Carolina among officials at the state level.” Following Haley’s announcement and the other GOP candidates backing her decision, Walker has discovered his opposition to the Confederate flag, tweeting:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich

The potential presidential hopeful also took to Twitter to express his support for Haley:

GOP Presidential Nominee Hopeful Ben Carson

The retired neurosurgeon will not say if the flag should stay or go, noting that all these statement supporting the removal of the flag lack substance and action and ultimately will not fix or erase our nation’s race issues. “So often as a society we deal with the symptoms without dealing with the disease and we think we’ve done something,” Carson said in a telephone interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam

Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee has lifted a page from McAuliffe’s book, saying he supports the removal of the flag from specialty license tags. (In 2012, he signed a bill allowing the Confederate flag to go on motorcycles.)

Democratic Presidential Nominee Candidate Hillary Clinton

CNN has reported that Clinton will be giving a speech on Tuesday at Christ the King Church outside of Ferguson, Missouri, where she plans to support the removal of the Confederate flag but also stress that these actions alone are not a solution to our nation’s racial tensions.

There are others who will not be moved:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee

It’s unclear what Huckabee’s thoughts on the flag are, but he is clear about his views on God. Over the weekend he said he did not believe the question of the flag was one for presidential candidates. But during a Fox News appearance on Monday, he said, “I don’t think the president of the United States needs to be picking the symbols that fly on the state Capitol grounds.” He continued “I keep hearing people saying we need more conversations about race. Actually we don’t need more conversations. What we need is conversions because the reconciliations that changes people is not a racial reconciliation—it’s a spiritual reconciliation when people are reconciled to God.”

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour

Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, a day after the South Carolina governor’s call for action, Barbour said he is “not offended at all” by the Confederate flag. This, however, isn’t surprising. In 2011 he came under criticism when he refused to condemn a proposed state license plate that honored a Confederate general and early Klu Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not all in Barbour’s family, however, are for the flag. In a sign of a hopeful and eventual changing of the guard, Barbour’s nephew Henry took to Twitter expressing the need for change.

Of course, South Carolina Gov. Haley cannot alone call for the flag’s removal. As politicians and companies across the nation weigh in on the topic, the big question is how local leaders will respond. The Post and Courier reached out to legislators across the state to see where they stand on the flag’s removal. As of 2 p.m. EST, 51 state House representatives and 21 state senators said they believed it should be removed.

Even corporations are starting to jettison the controversial symbol from inventory. “We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer,” Walmart spokesman Brian Nick said in an emailed statement to USA Today. “We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment—whether in our stores or on our web site.” While Sears Holdings, which runs K-Mart and Sears, does not currently sell Confederate flag merchandise in its brick-and-mortar stores, it sells this type of merchandise online through a third-party vendor, and recently announced that it plans to discontinue these sales. Ebay followed suit, saying it would ban the listings of Confederate flags or any related items with images of the flag.

But one retailer is profiting from attacks on the flag. Amazon reports its sales of Confederate flag memorabilia have increased by 2,300 percent.

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Here’s How Fast Politicians Are Now Fleeing From the Confederate Flag

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Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

by UlrichLompdh Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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The death of nine innocent worshippers may achieve what decades of civil rights activism failed to do: Force South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag from grounds of its capitol building.

The Confederate battle flag flew over the capitol dome in Columbia, S.C., from 1962, when the legislature hoisted it as a symbol of defiance against integration, to 2000, when huge protests convinced state lawmakers to move it elsewhere. But it didn’t go far: The flag has flown over a Confederate soldiers’ memorial on the capitol grounds ever since.

The shooting in Charleston is leading to new calls to take down the Confederate flag for good, including one from the mayor of Columbia:

Now we’ve also seen some tentative hints that figures on the right may actually be willing to let that happen:

Nikki Haley

The South Carolina governor infamously called a non-issue during her re-election campaign last year because she “had not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag” during calls with business leaders. She also rejected at least one previous call by the NAACP to remove the flag.

But during an interview on Friday with Reuters, Haley seemed open to re-examining the deal that moved the Confederate flag to its current spot

“If they want to have this conversation again, they will,” Haley said of the state legislature. “They had it 15 years ago. They came to a consensus, that’s where it was. I think they’ll have another conversation, and we’ll bring people together.”

Lindsey Graham

Many people, including us, blasted the South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate when he told CNN on Friday morning that the flag is “part of who we are” in his state. But he also said he was open to changing the capitol’s awkward compromise on the flag.

“It’s time for people in South Carolina to revisit that decision,” he said. “It would be fine with me.”

During the 2012 GOP primaries, Graham called the use of the flag at the Confederate War Memorial a “bipartisan” solution and advised candidates to avoid the topic altogether. “Any candidate who brought that up wouldn’t be doing themselves any favors,” he said to The Hill.

The National Review

Writers at the conservative magazine—which firmly backed the South’s mantra of states’ rights during the civil rights era—debated the use of the flag on Thursday. Executive Editor Reihan Salam came out firmly against it:

It could be that the Confederate battle flag has come to mean something entirely different in 2015 than it did in the mid-1950s, when it was closely tied to resistance to federal desegregation efforts. But is its value such that we ought to continue giving it quasi-official status, even when doing so alienates the descendants of enslaved southerners, who have just as much claim to deciding which symbols ought to represent southern heritage as the descendants of Confederate veterans? I don’t believe so.

Others were more skeptical: Ian Tuttle argued that “objections to the flag are not raised in good faith” but rather for political gain. But even he then acknowledged that the flag can cause serious harm and offense.

One can recognize, understand, and sympathize with the revulsion symbols of the Confederacy occasion in some quarters, particularly among black Americans — and a compromise should be possible. If reducing the visibility of these symbols would offer relief to those genuinely hurt, and would remove an object of contention keeping persons of different races from cooperating to advance true racial justice, that is something supporters of Confederate symbols should be able to do.

Charlie Baker

The pro-choice, pro-marriage equality Massachusetts governor is hardly an arch-conservative, but his experience on Thursday shows how the shock of the shooting may be acting on politicians. Baker told Boston’s WGBH early on Thursday afternoon that while he was against the flag personally, it was a “tradition” of South Carolina. “My view on stuff like this is that South Carolinians can make their own call,” he said.

Within hours, Baker was backtracking hard. “What were you thinking?” was the message he received from friends, he told the Boston Globe that evening. “I just want to be clear: I abhor the symbolism and the history of that flag as much as anybody, and I am more than cognizant of the fact that literally millions of Americans died over what it represents in the Civil War,” he said. “I think they should take the flag down.”

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Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

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