Why Cork fans must abandon this toxic flag

A deeply personal plea from a lecturer in US history (and a lifelong Cork supporter)

IHAVE been fanatically following Cork hurling for more than 40 years, ever since my late father first took me to the opening of Páirc Uí Chaoimh as a seven-year-old in June 1976. Three months later, on the first of countless visits to Croke Park, we saw Cork win the first of their fabled three in a row when defeating Wexford in that year’s All-Ireland final.

For those 40 years, the flying of the Confederate flag of secession has been a staple of Cork followers whenever our team plays a big game. That Confederate flag has flown amid flags of China, Che Guevara, the Rising Sun, Coca-Cola, the Stars and Stripes and other incongruous oddities. The common theme has been red and about the only national flag I haven’t seen over those 40 years with significant amounts of red in it has been the Union Jack.

Two distinct things bothered me last Saturday night. One was Cork’s chances in the All-Ireland semi-final against Waterford the following day. The other was the disturbing events emerging from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, a campus I visited some years ago when I was a visiting professor in the neighbouring University of North Carolina, just a few hours’ drive away.

Seeing well-armed white men in fatigues marching on the University of Virginia campus carrying Nazi and Confederate flags side by side, while chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘blood and soil’ shocked me – and I’m sure countless others – to the core. It was hard to imagine such an event taking place in one of the world’s great public universities.

It got me thinking about the likelihood of a Confederate flag flying at Croke Park the next day and what that would symbolise. Despairing as to what I saw in Charlottesville, I tweeted a picture from that rally of marching white supremacists carrying Nazi flags bearing the swastika and the secessionist flag of the Confederacy saying: ‘Fellow Cork people, no Confederate flag-carrying bull **** nonsense tomorrow. There’s nothing rebel about it and it’s not what we stand for.’

This seemed to strike a chord with some Twitter users, as it was retweeted more than 300 times and ‘liked’ close to 800. Normally very few people engage with my tweets, but this was different and, beyond a few people who couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Most seemed to think I had some kind of point. Alas, at Croke Park last Sunday not only did Cork lose but at least one Cork supporter out of the crowd of more than 72,000 decided it would be a good idea to fly the Confederate flag. They should perhaps learn a little history.

FOR more than 20 years I’ve taught American history and politics at Dublin City University. I’ve also lived and travelled in the Southern US and know its history well. At its core, the Confederate flag is a flag of oppression. The bars are a Christian cross declaring the divine right of the Southern rebels to trade and to enslave ethnicities. It is a flag of superiority and of the dominance of a way of life of white supremacy which treated black people as not only less than equal but sometimes also as less than human.

Last Saturday’s racist march in Virginia was supposedly in protest at the removal of the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, which stands on the Charlottesville campus. That statue dates from the first decade of the 20th century.

Lee himself opposed erecting statues to himself and to the cause he represented. Shortly before his death in October 1870 he wrote: ‘I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.’

President Donald Trump, would do well to remember that Lee’s cause in the American Civil war of 1861-5 was the obliteration of the United States of America and the establishment of a separate nation, called the Confederacy, which had as its core belief the continuation of slavery.

In the summer of 1863, Lee and his armies got to within 100 miles of Washington DC and it seemed that Abraham Lincoln, the president who ultimately freed the slaves and saved the Union, would have to sue for peace. This would have meant the sundering of the United States, the secession of the southern states, and the creation of two distinct countries.

The famous battle of Gettysburg began the turning of the tide in that savage war, which cost the lives of some 700,000 Americans. Yet for the black population, the following century was a struggle for equality and emancipation.

Well over three decades later, in 1899, the lynching of a black man called Sam Hose in Palmetto, Georgia, was written about in the Southern newspapers as if it was an All-Ireland final: ‘Public interest was so aroused that special excursion trains were scheduled to carry curious spectators from Atlanta. Ladies clothed in their Sunday finery watched from carriages, gazing excitedly over the heads of men carrying small children on their shoulders.

‘Yelps and cheers rose from the throng of some two thousand people as Hoses’s ears were sliced off and thrown to anxious onlookers. As he writhed in agony, fingers and toes were amputated before the screaming man’s tongue was removed with a pair of pliers. Only then was the coal oil poured over his prostrate body. There was a loud cheer as he was set aflame.’

YES, that’s what a lynching is actually like. It’s not simply someone being hung from a tree. Hose’s body parts ended up being sold by an enterprising Georgian. There was no shortage of buyers.

A couple of years ago I made an appearance on Newstalk’s Off The Ball sports programme as part of a discussion on Cork and the Confederate flag. I made the point then and repeat it now that I’m sure those Cork followers who fly that flag are not racist and see in it nothing but the red and perhaps some mythical idea of it being associated with rebels and risings.

This was a point echoed by Cork City Councillor Mick Finn during the week and various callers to Cork 96FM’s opinion line last Monday, on which I appeared calling for an end to the waving of Confederate flags at Cork games.

Ultimately, however, flags and symbols have meanings. Flying a flag of white supremacy at a time when the President of the United States sees no discernible difference between neoNazis and those who oppose them does mean something.

The Cork county board came out during the week to condemn the use of the Confederate flag. It was right to do so. Those who condone the flying of the flag as having no significance miss the larger point.

Racism is an insidious evil in modern societies. It raised its ugly head in Charlottesville last Saturday. Anything that gives such racism succour needs to be eliminated and that is why there is no place for the flying of the Confederate flag at Cork games or anywhere else.