Volume 17 , Issue 23

NW Okie's Journey

We are still researching Wild West Outlaws of the 19th century and have included more information in this week's newsletter. And ... with all the talk about the Confederate Battle Flag, we have included some history surrounding it that dates back to 1860's.

Did you remember in the 1950's when the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) appropriated the confederate flag when they were protesting segregation? The KKK used it as a symbol of racial hatred.

Did you know the confederate States of America went through three different flags during the Civil War, and the battle flag wasn't one of them?

The flag most people associate with the confederacy was the battle flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. It was designed by the confederate politician William Porcher Miles, and was rejected for use as the confederacy's official emblem, although it was incorporated into the two later flags as a canton. It only came to be the flag most prominently associated with the confederacy after the south lost the war.

In 1948, the newly formed segregationist Dixiecrat party adopted the flag as a symbol of resistance to the federal government. In the years following, the battle flag became an important part of segregationist symbolism, and was featured prominently on the 1956 redesign of Georgia's state flag, a legislative decision that was likely at least partly a response to the Supreme Court's decision to desegregate school a couple years earlier.

Other History of the Confederate Flag

It was in December 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union just months after Abraham Lincoln, from the anti-slavery Republican Party, was elected president. In April 1861, the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

There were ten other states that eventually followed South Carolina in secession and formed the confederate States of America. None of the three flags the confederacy would go on to adopt were the confederate flag that is traditionally recognized today (the "Stars and Bars" flag).

As racism and segregation gripped the nation in the century following, it became a divisive and violent emblem of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and white supremacist groups.

Good Night! Good Luck!
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