The room is a shrine to the Confederacy with a rebel-flag-themed cushion, curtains and even a mousepad. Greenwood, north-west MississippiĪfter driving north along the lonely stretch of Highway 49 through Delta plantation lands, we end up in Larry McCluney Jr’s attic in Greenwood.
Ongoing inequities, Be reminds, are bolstered by a kinder, gentler version of Confederate history rewritten after the south lost the civil war and its rights to maintain and extend slavery. All I’ve heard is a downplaying and whitewashing of history in an attempt to gaslight its population.” “I’ve never heard of an apology from the Klan in Franklin County for harassing and assaulting my family while flying that flag. “What has Mississippi done to say that it is sorry for the rape, torturing and killings of scores of its black citizens in order to create a white majority?” Be says. I have stuck my finger into a bullet hole in her family home where the Klan fired into the wall above where her aunt, then a child, slept. I met Be after reporting that her grandfather, Pastor Clyde Briggs, was a target of the Klan in the 1960s for trying to organize and arm black people against white supremacy. I later relay Lindy’s questions to Genesis Be, a 31-year-old hip-hop artist, public speaker and anti-Confederate flag activist from Biloxi. “Is it their feelings? … Mississippi has bent over backwards to say I’m sorry. She wonders why the flag is once again becoming a big deal. “I don’t think the black people around here care,” Lindy says. Neither Ira nor Lindy has asked black acquaintances why the flag is offensive, or asked why many believe it belongs in museums, but not part of a state emblem. Ira Isonhood adjusts the flag pole in the backyard of his home in Copiah County, Mississippi. “… Why are these minorities pushing to do away with this flag? Look at what’s happening to our statues!” he says. “The Confederate flag played a big, big part in our history,” Ira says. Still, Ira flies the flag, which his own high school and college used as an emblem. “Don’t ever allow your wife to sign ‘Mrs’ again!” he warned. When her husband came later, the storekeeper admonished him in front of young Ira. His father sent a note back with no groceries. One day, a black boy came to his dad’s store with a shopping list his mother had signed with “Mrs”. Ira Isonhood, 71, remembers his father inviting black people to sit in his yard to watch a basketball game through the window when he got the area’s first television – a progressive move in the mid-20th century south. The Isonhoods were the first stop of my May 2018 listening tour of Mississippi with photographer Kate Medley to ask flag supporters in our home state why they still support a symbol that represents so much pain, division and difficult history – even as they urge black Americans to get over their resistance to it. The matter is especially raw in Mississippi, a state that suffered tremendous Confederate casualties and went from being the richest state from slavery before the civil war to one of the poorest.
A photo soon emerged of him holding a Confederate flag. The debate reignited in 2015 after Dylann Roof killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In April 2001, Mississippians voted along race lines to keep the flag as it was. (Today, its supporters say the KKK co-opted it.) The Ku Klux Klan flew it at lynching parties and angry mobs waved it outside public schools as black children enrolled in front of white “segregation academies” and next to leering dogs unleashed on black protesters wanting the right to vote. By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in 1894, the flag was used to both honor the Confederate dead as well as a romanticized version of the war’s purpose.īy the mid-20th century, the flag symbolized white resistance to ending segregation laws. The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the “lost cause” of the war. After the north won, it imposed a harsh Reconstruction on the south that still fuels white resentment today. The flag’s history is fraught and complicated, as was the bloody civil war that erupted in 1861 between the US south – where America’s slave trade had relocated and expanded by the mid-1800s – and the north. Lindy and Ira Isonhood walk along Deer Hollow, their property in Copiah County, Mississippi.