In my rebel town, truth was left behind
I grew up — as did many people in my hometown — embracing the Confederate flag as a symbol for rebellion. On one family trip to Silver Dollar City, a kind of hillbilly nirvana-slashtheme-park in Branson, Mo., I purchased a Dixie flag. What buck-toothed little girl doesn’t want to be a rebel? I posed for a photo with it that night on my step-grandfather’s porch.
This was the ’60s. All around us, people were protesting, but those protests were happening off in the big, scary world, not in my mostly-all-white bubble, where the only people of color we saw were on television.
The world, our parents said, had gone crazy.
Year after year in my dusty Missouri Ozarks town, I sat through social studies classes where the Civil War was called the War of Northern Aggression. Our textbooks identified the conflict by its proper name, but who are you going to believe, a book or the teacher holding a grade book over your head? War of Northern Aggression it was.
On hot summer days, I rode my Spyder bike to a field that was supposed to be a meeting place for the local Klan. I was told if there was a truck or car parked nearby to keep on pedaling. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my hometown was a sundown town, though the city limit sign labeling it as such had long been shot to smithereens.
That souvenir Confederate flag hung in my bedroom for years, until one of my high school teachers drew the connection for me between the Civil War — not the War of Northern Aggression — and slavery. Like so many others in the class that day, I had family members who fought on both sides, and when grandparents told stories of bullets and blood, there was no delineation between the right and wrong side of history. I knew slavery was wrong. My Bible told me so, but heritage and a hillbilly’s devotion to dead ancestors prevented any careful examination of war records.
I was only half-listening the day Mr. Green mentioned state’s rights, but then Mr. Green — who was cool because he played in a country band on weekends — said states’ rights was strictly a surface explanation for the Civil War. He said states wanted to retain rights in order for white people to continue to own black people.
Why hadn’t I realized that before? I looked from my left to my right and some of us had our mouths open, like a bass in the bottom of a boat.
Well, my God, I thought. What else haven’t you told me? I went home anxious to share this newfound information, and as soon as my mother walked through the door, I stopped her with an indignant “Did you know…” But she’d voted for the unreconstructed George Wallace, so that was a short conversation.
Of course I’d noticed the lack of people of color in my hometown, and I wondered why they stayed away. I never heard anyone mention that at the turn of the last century, denizens of southwest Missouri lynched black men, drove their families out of town, and stole their property. Sometimes, they waited for terrorized families to abandon their shotgun shacks, but almost always they stole property.
The victims of the white vigilantes — I think we can call them terrorists, can we not? — included Horace Duncan, who in 1906 was arrested with another man on suspicion of — is there any faster way to mobilize a mob? — attacking a white woman. There was no evidence, the men’s employer provided an alibi, and the victim herself said these men were not her attackers, but a crowd of 3,000 or so stormed the Springfield jail anyway, pulled the men from their cells, lynched them, and then burned and desecrated their bodies. A replica of the Statue of Liberty stood at the top of the tower that bore their bodies.
Springfield was segregated, but up until then, it was considered a safe place for black families, at least compared to the rural area where I grew up. I learned this after reading, “White Man’s Heaven,” a book you don’t want to get caught carrying around because most people don’t bother to read the subtitle, “The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909.”
Well, my God. The U.S. Navy and Marines just banned Confederate flags in public spaces. NASCAR – gasp! – also joined suit. This is on us, all of us. Once again, we white people can watch the protests and think the world has gone crazy, but that would just be more (literal) whitewash. The information we need to know how to act has always been there, and though some of us are starting at a deficit, we need to catch up. It’s time. It’s past time.