Confederate flags in window met with rocks, lawsuit, tarp
The Confederate flags had been in a Manhattan apartment window for over a year. And then, in a matter of days last week, they were met with hurled rocks, a punched-out window, a tarp hung over them and legal action.
By Monday, the lighted flags were no more to be found in the seventh-floor windows in the East Village neighborhood, where the Confederate symbol had been displayed alongside an Israeli flag and a colonialera American one.
They’d attracted new attention after an Aug. 12 white nationalist rally to preserve a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, spiraled into violence that left a counterprotester dead and stirred debate over where or whether Confederate statues and symbols belong in 21st-century America.
A man lobbed rocks at the building last week while he and others yelled for the Confederate flags to be taken down, according to video made by a bystander and posted on local news site DNAInfo. Another man, Darren Keen, put a fist through one of the flag-flyer’s windows Friday night after getting to his fire escape from an adjoining roof, according to police, who arrested him on a disorderly conduct charge.
“I just lost my temper when I saw that Confederate flag,” Keen said Monday. To the Nebraska-born DJ, the flag symbolizes hatred and intolerance, and it galled him to see the banner displayed across the street from an organization that mentors and educates disadvantaged, largely minority girls from the neighborhood, where funky-chic cafes and pricey condos blend with public housing.
Still, the 34-year-old said he hoped anyone else who feels the same way would “make a sign — don’t break out a window.”
The flag-flyer, William Green, didn’t immediately respond to an email message Monday, and a possible phone number for him rang unanswered. But he has noted that he’d had the banners up for more than a year.
“I find all the alleged commotion while I’m on vacation a little suspicious,” he wrote in an email that the landlord attached when filing a lawsuit against him Saturday. “Whatever the drama, ‘this too shall pass.’”
The suit asked a court to force the flags’ removal, saying Green had violated his lease and rent-stabilization laws by creating an “anti-social nuisance” that was causing “fear, civil commotion, violence, protests and unpredictable behavior.”
Other tenants had barraged the landlord with complaints about being accosted and accused by people who wanted the flags gone, the suit said. It was withdrawn Monday.
Meanwhile, the area’s city councilwoman, Rosie Mendez, cautioned residents in an open letter Thursday that flying a flag isn’t illegal in itself and warned them not to break laws in response.
Still, the Democrat asked the flags’ owner to take down “a symbol that is so offensive to the surrounding community.”
Amid the flap, the flags and their top-floor windows were obscured Friday by a massive tarp hung from the roof, prompting the city to send building inspectors out to make sure the drape didn’t endanger the public. The inspectors found the tarp was safely secured, Buildings Department spokesman Andrew Rudansky said.