Partly false. The colors of the Confederate battle flag do not have religious significance, nor does the cross. The stars do represent the 13 Southern states of secession. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to fact-check social media posts here. By Reuters Staff 5 Min Read. Reuters Fact Check. Clare Corbould has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
She is a member of the Australian Greens. Most Australians — aside from a few groups dedicated to reenacting American Civil War battles and history buffs including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley — were not familiar until recently with the charged history of the flag of the Confederate States of America. Now the flag is in the Australian news with reports SAS military in Afghanistan in used the bold red, blue and white flag to guide in a US helicopter. Two SAS personnel also posed for a photograph with the flag.
Because the flag has long symbolised defiance, rebellion, an ideal of whiteness and the social and political exclusion of non-white people — in a word, racism. The flag represents the Confederate States of America CSA or Confederacy , created in when 11 states seceded from the year-old nation. This rebellion was prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.
Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west.
In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism. Read more: The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurling. Within a decade of the end of the war even before the end of Reconstruction in , white Southerners began using the Confederate flag as a memorial symbol for fallen heroes.
Far from being suppressed, the Confederate version of history and Confederate symbols became mainstream in the postwar South. The Confederate national flags were part of that mainstream, but the battle flag was clearly preeminent. The United Confederate Veterans UCV issued a report in defining the square ANV pattern flag as the Confederate battle flag, effectively writing out of the historical record the wide variety of battle flags under which Confederate soldiers had served. What is remarkable looking back from the 21st century is that, from the s and into the s, Confederate heritage organizations used the flag widely in their rituals memorializing and celebrating the Confederacy and its heroes, yet managed to maintain effective ownership of the flag and its meaning.
Hints of change were evident by the early 20th century. The battle flag had emerged not only as the most popular symbol of the Confederacy, but also of the South more generally. By the s, as Southern men mingled more frequently with non-Southerners in the U. Armed Forces and met them on the gridiron, they expressed their identity as Southerners with Confederate battle flags.
College campuses are often incubators of cultural change, and they apparently were for the battle flag. Lee was its president. A Confederate memorial organization in its own right, Kappa Alpha was also a fraternity and introduced Confederate symbols into collegiate life.
It was in the hands of students that the flag burst onto the political scene in Student delegates from Southern colleges and universities waved battle flags on the floor of the Southern States Rights Party convention in July The Confederate flag became a symbol of protest against civil rights and in support of Jim Crow.
But most observers concluded that the flag fad was another manifestation of youth-driven material culture. Confederate heritage organizations correctly perceived the Dixiecrat movement and the flag fad as a profound threat to their ownership of the Confederate flag. All those efforts proved futile. Meanwhile, as the civil rights movement gathered force, especially in the wake of the U. Board of Education decision, defenders of segregation increasingly employed the use of the battle flag as a symbol of their cause.
Although founded by Confederate veterans almost immediately after the Civil War, the KKK did not use the Confederate flag widely or at all in its ritual in the s and s or during its rebirth and nationwide popularity from to the late s. Only with a second rebirth in the late s and s did the battle flag take hold in the Klan. The Civil. Rights Era has profoundly affected the history of the Confederate flag in several ways.
Americans 50 or older came of age when a symbolic landscape dotted with Confederate flags, monuments and street names was the status quo. That status quo was of course the result of a prolonged period in which African Americans were effectively excluded from the process of shaping the symbolic landscape.
As African Americans gained political power, they challenged—and disrupted— that status quo.
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