NASCAR caught in headlights of flag flap
Confederate connection won’t go away easily deep in the southern heart of Trump’s America
HEFLIN, Ala. — The old Confederate symbols were falling fast now — the statues, the names of streets, the Rebel flags flying over the Talladega Superspeedway — and in the town of Heflin, a sense of unease was spreading in places people usually felt secure.
At Calvary Baptist Church, the minister was preaching from the Book of Revelation. At the local dirt track, fans were trying not to think about it. At the Dixie General Store, a kind of panic buying was underway.
“I need a Rebel flag — a big one,” a customer was saying.
“You going to put it on the back of your truck?” said Bob Castello, the store owner.
“Yeah, the lady on the phone said you had one 12-by-18?” the man said, meaning feet, not inches.
“You got anything bigger?”
“Well, 12-by-18 is huge,” Castello said, pointing to the enormous flag on the wall. “This one will fly better,” he said, showing him another one. “The lighter ones fly better.”
This is how the great American reckoning was unfolding in recent days in a place as white, evangelical and Confederate flag-flying as anywhere in the country. A hundred miles to the south in Montgomery, the newest monument to Southern history was a memorial to more than 4,400 black victims of lynchings that took place in the decades following the Civil War. Seventy-five miles to the west, the mayor of Birmingham had ordered a prominent Confederate monument removed, defying a state law meant to protect them. Thirty miles away in Talladega, one of the most storied races in sports was about to be run for the first time in its 50-year history without Confederate imagery.
“The presence of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans,” the NASCAR statement announcing the ban had read.
“That Talladega crap” is what some people were calling it in Heflin, population 3,400, where U.S. President Donald Trump received 82 per cent of the vote in 2016.
Castello, who figured he was “everything these liberals hate,” had started checking in with police about possible threats to his store, which appeared along a rural twolane road as clusters of flapping Confederate flags, Christian flags, American flags and Trump flags bright against the Appalachian foothills.
Inside was a shrine to all the Southern mythology being swept away.
“Whatcha got?” the clerk was saying now as she rang up a customer buying a Rebel flag blanket, a Rebel flag shot glass and two etchings of the Confederate Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson.
“Will this be all?” she said to a man buying a Rebel flag steering wheel cover, a Rebel flag hat, a Rebel flag hood cover and a Trump 2020 licence plate, and all day long, customers slapped open the front door with a sense of urgency Castello had never quite seen.
Battle flag holsters, belt buckles, belts, boots, T-shirts, wallets, lighters, key chains, lanyards, lapel pins, toothpick holders, a homemade Rebel flag made from empty tobacco tins — it was all flying out the door so fast that Castello called in two clerks for reinforcement. “Seems like it’s just boiled over here the last few days,” he said.
“Especially with that NASCAR nonsense,” a customer said.
A few hours later, the sun was setting on a clear-sky day as cars began circling the track at New Hollis Speedway, packing the dirt — a growling parade of fat tires, dented doors and mismatched hoods including two painted with the Rebel flag, one with the American flag, and the rest with flames, names of girlfriends, lucky numbers and local sponsors.
“Let’s go guys, let’s go!” the track announcer called out. “If you want hot laps you better get on the track now. Bombers to the grid. Bombers to the grid.”
Cars and trucks were pulling in stocked with coolers and lawn chairs and vinegar potato chips. People were sitting on rusted bleachers or leaning on the wire fence in T-shirts bearing names of logging companies and farm suppliers and auto stores. Kids were playing in the dirt.
Along the wire fence sat a 54-year-old man named Lonnie Miles in jeans and boots the colour of the dirt, enjoying the place his father had taken him since he was eight years old. “Feels good being here,” he said. “You ain’t got nobody going ‘nya, nya, nya’ picking on you.”
He called the flag ban “nonsense,” and more importantly, an affront to his own sense of himself as a decent person with what he considered to be genuine relationships with Black neighbours.
“I got plenty of African-American friends — I’ve known ’em since I was 14,” said Miles, adding that he learned to say ‘African-American’ out of respect. “They know if they need anything, all they have to do is ask me. I have supper with them, and they have supper with me too. Only thing I don’t like is Blacks and whites mixing, but I keep that to myself.”
“Talladega don’t compare to this,” said Kendall Bell, sitting on the bleachers, leaning in to watch.
“This is doorknob to doorknob, redneck to redneck.”
“Ain’t as much politics in it for sure,” said the man sitting behind him.
“That’s because there’s not as much money in it,” said Bell, who had a grey beard and a trucker hat and said he’d thought about tattooing the Rebel flag on his back and walking through the gates of Talladega. “NASCAR was invented here. It was created by people here. The racers. The bootleggers. It wasn’t the political garbage it is now. Black, white, who cares?”
“It’s their right to pull it down but it’s not my right to keep it up?” said the man behind him, launching into a tirade about majority-Black cities and black crime until Bell turned around and told him he was being offensive.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Bell said to the man. “My daughter married a Black guy. Sure did, and it took me a long time to accept that. My daddy raised me different. And it took me a long time. But when he started taking care of my daughter?
“And taking care of those kids? And putting them in nice clothes? What am I supposed to say? My daughter’s happy. It took me a long time now, I promise you that. Me and him had some problems till we worked it out. Now I love him to death. He says to me, ‘That’s the South.’ But it took me a long time.”
“I’d never accept it,” said the man behind him. “I would never.”