In our October 30th issue we reported on a lawsuit against the city of Danville, Virginia that was tossed out by a local judge who did not want the city to bear the burden of its heritage violations. The following was received this week in follow-up to that story:
The Virginia Flaggers are thrilled to announce the completion of our latest Interstate Memorial Battle Flag project. Earlier today, a 20' x 30' battle flag was raised on a 90' pole on the Danville Expressway.
This memorial, erected on private property leased by the Virginia Flaggers, is a direct response to the ruling yesterday by Danville Circuit Court Judge James Reynolds, who dismissed a suit filed against the City of Danville after City Council passed an ordinance which violated state law and was specifically designed to allow City Council to remove the Third National Confederate flag from the Veteran's monument on the grounds of the Sutherlin Mansion, the Last Capitol of the Confederacy.
While attorneys and plaintiffs in the case consider their options in appealing the ruling and/or filing new litigation, we have joined with the citizens of Danville to take the fight to the streets. Thanks to an outpouring of financial support and the dedication and hard work of Danville residents and supporters, the flag raised today is the FIFTH massive Roadside Memorial Battle Flag raised in and around Danville since the tiny 3x5 flag at the Sutherlin Mansion was removed.
These Memorial Flag sites, and the others in development across Danville, are just one phase of a battle plan that is being developed and implemented to assure that the Confederate Veterans who fought to defend Danville and the Commonwealth, and our proud history and heritage will not be desecrated by the cowardly acts of politicians and scalawags who pander to the PC demands of the ignorant and hateful few.
We have only just begun to fight.
The flag raised today, our 13th raised in the Commonwealth since the fall of 2013, was dedicated to the Glory of God, and in memory and honor of our Confederate Heroes. She will serve as a living breathing memorial, and a 24/7 reminder that there are still those of use with Confederate blood flowing through our veins who will not sit idly by while our heritage is attacked, history is erased, and our Veterans become the subject of derision Gen. Cleburne warned us about over 150 years ago.
"For every flag removed, a thousand more will rise to take its place."
Susan Hathaway
Va Flaggers
ARE YOU GOING TO BE IN FLORIDA TOMORROW?
The Confederate Cow Cavalry Camp #2181 will be hosting an Iron Cross Dedication Ceremony on Saturday November 14th at 10:30am at the Joshua Creek Cemetery in Arcadia. They will be dedicating about 15 Iron Crosses. Please make every effort to come out & support this event to Honor Our Ancestors. If you plan on assisting in the ceremony, please arrive no later than 9:15am. You may also want to bring a chair, so you can be comfortable for the Ceremony. The address for the Cemetery is 4354 SE County Road 760 Arcadia Florida. Hope to see you at the Ceremony.
DEO VINDICE
T.M. Fyock
15th Brigade Commander
Florida Division
BATTLEGROUND MISSISSIPPI GETS EVEN NASTIER
The Enemies of Southern Heritage ship in PAID YANKEE activists!
From this week's New York Times
LOUISVILLE, Miss. - In single strokes after the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston in June, Confederate battle flags were taken from statehouse grounds in South Carolina and Alabama, pulled from shelves at major retailers like Walmart and declared unwelcome, if to limited effect, at Nascar races.
What happened so swiftly elsewhere is not so simple in Mississippi. The Confederate battle flag is not simply flying in one hotly disputed spot at the State Capitol but occupying the upper left corner of the state flag, which has been flying since 1894. And as recently as 2001, Mississippians voted by a nearly two-to-one ratio to keep it. Recent polling suggests the majority have not changed their minds.
"My flag's been flying for 33 years, and I'm not about to take it down," said Nancy Jenkins, 58, a postal worker who is white and who flies the Mississippi flag and the United States flag at her house a block south of Louisville City Hall. "It doesn't stand for hate. It means a lot of people fought and died."
Over the past few months, there have been scattered outbreaks of municipal defiance by those who find the Confederate flag offensive, as mayors and city councils from the Delta to the Pine Belt have decided to no longer fly the state flag.
But beyond these sporadic gestures, any organized effort was always going to wait until politicians were on the safe side of this year's election. With the closing of the polls on Tuesday night, what could turn out to be the last battle over the Confederate flag in Mississippi has begun in earnest.
"It's all about momentum," said Dane Waters, the head of Tipping Point strategies, a communications and advocacy firm. "If you take a pocket here and pocket there of things happening, I don't think anything is going to change."
This week, Mr. Waters, a self-described conservative who has been retained by a group of people he declined to name, will arrive in Mississippi to pick up a difficult task: forming an unlikely and perhaps unmanageable alliance of preachers, business executives, state boosters and civil rights advocates to remove forever the Confederate battle flag from the state flag.
He is working with the Flag for All Mississippians Coalition, which was started by Sharon Brown, an activist in Jackson, who is black. The campaign has already been organizing supporters and held a hundreds-strong rally at the State Capitol. But Mr. Waters spoke of other tools that will be brought to bear outside the public eye, such as pressure on political donors and lobbying in the Legislature.
The coalition that he and others are trying to put together would need to unite groups almost never politically aligned, testing the depth of what Mr. Waters called the state's "tremendous social, economic and racial divide."
In the immediate aftermath of Charleston, it seemed that such a coalition might be possible here. Several conservative political leaders called for a change, including the state's two United States senators and the speaker of the Mississippi House (inspiring critics to print "Keep the Flag, Change the Speaker" yard signs). Down came flags at city buildings in Grenada, Magnolia, Starkville, Clarksdale and Yazoo City. In October, even the University of Mississippi lowered the flag at the circle where segregationists once clashed with federal troops over the admission of James Meredith.
But the move to change the flag, which, in the words of the daughter of the state senator who designed it, was intended to "perpetuate in a legal and lasting way that dear battle flag under which so many of our people had so gloriously fought," is not widely popular. It takes no time at all in any Mississippi downtown to find that out.
"This is what we stand for - this is our pride," Trey Jefcoat, a 26-year-old construction worker in Hattiesburg, said on the October day that the nearby University of Southern Mississippi took down the state flag on campus. "We don't think it's offensive, and most of the black folks I know don't think it's offensive."
Partisanship in Mississippi has become ever more racially polarized, and there are few topics on which racial division has been more explicit. In the 2001 referendum, according to the book "Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008," 90 percent of whites voted to keep the flag as it is. Among blacks, 95 percent voted for a new design, which replaced the cross with a circle of white stars.
"Don't try to force me as a black man who knows his history to honor something that goes against my heritage," said Robert Brown, a 42-year-old barber in Louisville, a small town in the central Mississippi pines with a population that is about 60 percent black.
Over the summer, Mr. Brown began using his post at Eiland's Straight Line Barbershop to expound upon the causes of the Civil War, lecturing to the men who had come in for a trim or a shave about slavery, the meaning of the battle flag and the offense of its lingering in the state flag. One evening in September, he went to City Hall to ask that officials follow the example of the other scattered towns and cities and vote on whether to fly the state flag.
He was met, he said, with mannerly talk of pressing budgets and correct protocol, and ultimately told that this was really an issue best left to the Legislature. The state flag still flies.
If a new flag is to be adopted, the simple math of a 60 percent white majority statewide dictates that it will come down to whether enough whites support it, either in the Legislature or at the polls. Feelings about the flag run so deep - as evident from the recent arrest of a man in Tupelo who was accused of firebombing a Walmart for not selling Confederate merchandise - that a widespread change of heart seems hard to fathom.
At a Hardee's a few blocks north of Louisville City Hall, older men talked over coffee of how "the blacks" tried to get the flag taken down at City Hall and the cemetery - one man drives by daily to make sure they are still flying - and how such crusades would be as doomed across the state as they were here.
The minority who want the flag changed should not be allowed to dictate to the majority who want it kept, Carl Higginbotham, 63, said.
"Funds need to be cut off for that school," he added of Ole Miss.
With sentiments like these widespread, many advocates of a change in the flag, Democrat and Republican alike, believe their only hope lies in the Legislature. They speak bluntly of the odds against them in a statewide vote and of the kind of international attention Mississippi would attract. But they also acknowledge that legislators and state officials, beyond those who staunchly defend the flag, would probably be quite happy to turn over such an incendiary topic to a referendum.
Derrick Johnson, the president of the state conference of the N.A.A.C.P., said he would actively oppose a referendum, insisting that economic pressure was the only answer. "There's never been a change in Mississippi when it comes to racial relations without pressure," he said.
State Representative Scott DeLano, a Republican, also said a legislative solution was the preferred way to bring about a change, but he insisted that too much provocation could jeopardize the good will required for a successful vote.
"Within Republican circles there have been discussions about this," he said, "about how we start the discussion and how we work towards unifying the state, and what that discussion would look like."
"I think it's going to take some more time," he added.
Time appears to be somewhat short. Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican who won an overwhelming victory over token opposition on Tuesday, recently came out in support of putting the question on next year's ballot.
"I trust the people of the state of Mississippi as they are the sovereigns of this state," he said recently. "They should be empowered as to the decision of what their flag should look like."
There is no making everyone happy on this, said Charlie Box of Columbus, a small city near the Alabama line that claims to have been the site of the first Confederate Memorial Day.
Mr. Box is one of two whites on the six-member City Council, which voted in July to take down state flags at city buildings. He was not a fan of this approach, believing the city should defer to the state, and found the whole issue unnecessarily divisive, he said. When he polled his mostly white district, he found many dead set against taking the flag down; one woman put his photograph up in her beauty salon afterward, identifying him as persona non grata.
But about half of those he polled told him what eventually formed the basis of his decision: that it was time to take the flag down and move on.
"I just think people are tired of hearing about this," Mr. Box said.
The vote, in the end, was unanimous.
H.R.3007 - To amend title 38, United States Code, to prohibit the display of the Confederate battle flag in national cemeteries.
Sponsor:
Rep. Gallego, Ruben [D-AZ-7] (Introduced 07/09/2015)
Committees:
House - Veterans' Affairs
Latest Action:
08/05/2015 Referred to the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs.
The following was sent to his Congressman by Ken Minton
Ken is the Historian for the General Jubal A. Early Camp 556 in Tampa
Dear Congressman Rooney,
Please oppose H.R. 3007 to amend Title 38, US Code, to prohibit the display of the Confederate battle flag in national cemeteries. About the only time Confederate flags are in national cemeteries is when there are Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.
This situation exists and on Confederate memorial day or similar events, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) or the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) sometimes place very small flags on the graves of these long deceased Confederate soldiers. In many cases, ancestors of the soldiers are present.
Neither the UDC or the SCV are racist organizations. The membership includes ancestors of white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other Confederate soldiers. These are heritage organizations, not hate groups.
While I am a Vietnam War veteran, my Dad was a WW2 veteran, and my son is an Iraqi war veteran, we give honor to all our ancestors. I had ancestors from Tennessee who were Confederates and ancestors from Kentucky who were Union soldiers, as well as Confederate soldiers. I honor them all.
The continuing attempt to wipe all vestiges of Southern heritage and history needs to cease. Please oppose this legislation at every step.
JUST REPORTED ON A TV STATION IN NORTH CAROLINA
MATTHEWS, N.C. - A North Carolina woman said she is taking a stand against a neighbor over the Confederate flag.
Alexa Rice told WCNC that she was riding her bike home from work when she noticed a truck in her neighborhood that had a Confederate flag sticker on its window.
After going home, Rice thought about how angry she was and decided to go back and remove the sticker.
Rice recorded herself taking the sticker off of the truck and replacing it with a note that said:
"The Confederate flag is inherently racist. Under this flag, the South fought to defend slavery. This version of the flag was reinstated in the segregation era, again to defend racism. I don't care if it's your "heritage," racism is nothing to be proud of. "
The note Rice placed on the car has since been removed. WCNC went door-to-door to try to find the owner of the truck, but no one was available for comment.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
YES, we are still giving a FREE eBook (PDF) copy of the book The Truth About the Confederate Flag to everyone who visits the website - so tell your friends - and your enemies!
www.dixieheritage.weebly.com
Until next week,
Deo Vindice!
Chaplain Ed
The Virginia Flaggers are thrilled to announce the completion of our latest Interstate Memorial Battle Flag project. Earlier today, a 20' x 30' battle flag was raised on a 90' pole on the Danville Expressway.
This memorial, erected on private property leased by the Virginia Flaggers, is a direct response to the ruling yesterday by Danville Circuit Court Judge James Reynolds, who dismissed a suit filed against the City of Danville after City Council passed an ordinance which violated state law and was specifically designed to allow City Council to remove the Third National Confederate flag from the Veteran's monument on the grounds of the Sutherlin Mansion, the Last Capitol of the Confederacy.
While attorneys and plaintiffs in the case consider their options in appealing the ruling and/or filing new litigation, we have joined with the citizens of Danville to take the fight to the streets. Thanks to an outpouring of financial support and the dedication and hard work of Danville residents and supporters, the flag raised today is the FIFTH massive Roadside Memorial Battle Flag raised in and around Danville since the tiny 3x5 flag at the Sutherlin Mansion was removed.
These Memorial Flag sites, and the others in development across Danville, are just one phase of a battle plan that is being developed and implemented to assure that the Confederate Veterans who fought to defend Danville and the Commonwealth, and our proud history and heritage will not be desecrated by the cowardly acts of politicians and scalawags who pander to the PC demands of the ignorant and hateful few.
We have only just begun to fight.
The flag raised today, our 13th raised in the Commonwealth since the fall of 2013, was dedicated to the Glory of God, and in memory and honor of our Confederate Heroes. She will serve as a living breathing memorial, and a 24/7 reminder that there are still those of use with Confederate blood flowing through our veins who will not sit idly by while our heritage is attacked, history is erased, and our Veterans become the subject of derision Gen. Cleburne warned us about over 150 years ago.
"For every flag removed, a thousand more will rise to take its place."
Susan Hathaway
Va Flaggers
ARE YOU GOING TO BE IN FLORIDA TOMORROW?
The Confederate Cow Cavalry Camp #2181 will be hosting an Iron Cross Dedication Ceremony on Saturday November 14th at 10:30am at the Joshua Creek Cemetery in Arcadia. They will be dedicating about 15 Iron Crosses. Please make every effort to come out & support this event to Honor Our Ancestors. If you plan on assisting in the ceremony, please arrive no later than 9:15am. You may also want to bring a chair, so you can be comfortable for the Ceremony. The address for the Cemetery is 4354 SE County Road 760 Arcadia Florida. Hope to see you at the Ceremony.
DEO VINDICE
T.M. Fyock
15th Brigade Commander
Florida Division
BATTLEGROUND MISSISSIPPI GETS EVEN NASTIER
The Enemies of Southern Heritage ship in PAID YANKEE activists!
From this week's New York Times
LOUISVILLE, Miss. - In single strokes after the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston in June, Confederate battle flags were taken from statehouse grounds in South Carolina and Alabama, pulled from shelves at major retailers like Walmart and declared unwelcome, if to limited effect, at Nascar races.
What happened so swiftly elsewhere is not so simple in Mississippi. The Confederate battle flag is not simply flying in one hotly disputed spot at the State Capitol but occupying the upper left corner of the state flag, which has been flying since 1894. And as recently as 2001, Mississippians voted by a nearly two-to-one ratio to keep it. Recent polling suggests the majority have not changed their minds.
"My flag's been flying for 33 years, and I'm not about to take it down," said Nancy Jenkins, 58, a postal worker who is white and who flies the Mississippi flag and the United States flag at her house a block south of Louisville City Hall. "It doesn't stand for hate. It means a lot of people fought and died."
Over the past few months, there have been scattered outbreaks of municipal defiance by those who find the Confederate flag offensive, as mayors and city councils from the Delta to the Pine Belt have decided to no longer fly the state flag.
But beyond these sporadic gestures, any organized effort was always going to wait until politicians were on the safe side of this year's election. With the closing of the polls on Tuesday night, what could turn out to be the last battle over the Confederate flag in Mississippi has begun in earnest.
"It's all about momentum," said Dane Waters, the head of Tipping Point strategies, a communications and advocacy firm. "If you take a pocket here and pocket there of things happening, I don't think anything is going to change."
This week, Mr. Waters, a self-described conservative who has been retained by a group of people he declined to name, will arrive in Mississippi to pick up a difficult task: forming an unlikely and perhaps unmanageable alliance of preachers, business executives, state boosters and civil rights advocates to remove forever the Confederate battle flag from the state flag.
He is working with the Flag for All Mississippians Coalition, which was started by Sharon Brown, an activist in Jackson, who is black. The campaign has already been organizing supporters and held a hundreds-strong rally at the State Capitol. But Mr. Waters spoke of other tools that will be brought to bear outside the public eye, such as pressure on political donors and lobbying in the Legislature.
The coalition that he and others are trying to put together would need to unite groups almost never politically aligned, testing the depth of what Mr. Waters called the state's "tremendous social, economic and racial divide."
In the immediate aftermath of Charleston, it seemed that such a coalition might be possible here. Several conservative political leaders called for a change, including the state's two United States senators and the speaker of the Mississippi House (inspiring critics to print "Keep the Flag, Change the Speaker" yard signs). Down came flags at city buildings in Grenada, Magnolia, Starkville, Clarksdale and Yazoo City. In October, even the University of Mississippi lowered the flag at the circle where segregationists once clashed with federal troops over the admission of James Meredith.
But the move to change the flag, which, in the words of the daughter of the state senator who designed it, was intended to "perpetuate in a legal and lasting way that dear battle flag under which so many of our people had so gloriously fought," is not widely popular. It takes no time at all in any Mississippi downtown to find that out.
"This is what we stand for - this is our pride," Trey Jefcoat, a 26-year-old construction worker in Hattiesburg, said on the October day that the nearby University of Southern Mississippi took down the state flag on campus. "We don't think it's offensive, and most of the black folks I know don't think it's offensive."
Partisanship in Mississippi has become ever more racially polarized, and there are few topics on which racial division has been more explicit. In the 2001 referendum, according to the book "Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008," 90 percent of whites voted to keep the flag as it is. Among blacks, 95 percent voted for a new design, which replaced the cross with a circle of white stars.
"Don't try to force me as a black man who knows his history to honor something that goes against my heritage," said Robert Brown, a 42-year-old barber in Louisville, a small town in the central Mississippi pines with a population that is about 60 percent black.
Over the summer, Mr. Brown began using his post at Eiland's Straight Line Barbershop to expound upon the causes of the Civil War, lecturing to the men who had come in for a trim or a shave about slavery, the meaning of the battle flag and the offense of its lingering in the state flag. One evening in September, he went to City Hall to ask that officials follow the example of the other scattered towns and cities and vote on whether to fly the state flag.
He was met, he said, with mannerly talk of pressing budgets and correct protocol, and ultimately told that this was really an issue best left to the Legislature. The state flag still flies.
If a new flag is to be adopted, the simple math of a 60 percent white majority statewide dictates that it will come down to whether enough whites support it, either in the Legislature or at the polls. Feelings about the flag run so deep - as evident from the recent arrest of a man in Tupelo who was accused of firebombing a Walmart for not selling Confederate merchandise - that a widespread change of heart seems hard to fathom.
At a Hardee's a few blocks north of Louisville City Hall, older men talked over coffee of how "the blacks" tried to get the flag taken down at City Hall and the cemetery - one man drives by daily to make sure they are still flying - and how such crusades would be as doomed across the state as they were here.
The minority who want the flag changed should not be allowed to dictate to the majority who want it kept, Carl Higginbotham, 63, said.
"Funds need to be cut off for that school," he added of Ole Miss.
With sentiments like these widespread, many advocates of a change in the flag, Democrat and Republican alike, believe their only hope lies in the Legislature. They speak bluntly of the odds against them in a statewide vote and of the kind of international attention Mississippi would attract. But they also acknowledge that legislators and state officials, beyond those who staunchly defend the flag, would probably be quite happy to turn over such an incendiary topic to a referendum.
Derrick Johnson, the president of the state conference of the N.A.A.C.P., said he would actively oppose a referendum, insisting that economic pressure was the only answer. "There's never been a change in Mississippi when it comes to racial relations without pressure," he said.
State Representative Scott DeLano, a Republican, also said a legislative solution was the preferred way to bring about a change, but he insisted that too much provocation could jeopardize the good will required for a successful vote.
"Within Republican circles there have been discussions about this," he said, "about how we start the discussion and how we work towards unifying the state, and what that discussion would look like."
"I think it's going to take some more time," he added.
Time appears to be somewhat short. Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican who won an overwhelming victory over token opposition on Tuesday, recently came out in support of putting the question on next year's ballot.
"I trust the people of the state of Mississippi as they are the sovereigns of this state," he said recently. "They should be empowered as to the decision of what their flag should look like."
There is no making everyone happy on this, said Charlie Box of Columbus, a small city near the Alabama line that claims to have been the site of the first Confederate Memorial Day.
Mr. Box is one of two whites on the six-member City Council, which voted in July to take down state flags at city buildings. He was not a fan of this approach, believing the city should defer to the state, and found the whole issue unnecessarily divisive, he said. When he polled his mostly white district, he found many dead set against taking the flag down; one woman put his photograph up in her beauty salon afterward, identifying him as persona non grata.
But about half of those he polled told him what eventually formed the basis of his decision: that it was time to take the flag down and move on.
"I just think people are tired of hearing about this," Mr. Box said.
The vote, in the end, was unanimous.
H.R.3007 - To amend title 38, United States Code, to prohibit the display of the Confederate battle flag in national cemeteries.
Sponsor:
Rep. Gallego, Ruben [D-AZ-7] (Introduced 07/09/2015)
Committees:
House - Veterans' Affairs
Latest Action:
08/05/2015 Referred to the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs.
The following was sent to his Congressman by Ken Minton
Ken is the Historian for the General Jubal A. Early Camp 556 in Tampa
Dear Congressman Rooney,
Please oppose H.R. 3007 to amend Title 38, US Code, to prohibit the display of the Confederate battle flag in national cemeteries. About the only time Confederate flags are in national cemeteries is when there are Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.
This situation exists and on Confederate memorial day or similar events, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) or the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) sometimes place very small flags on the graves of these long deceased Confederate soldiers. In many cases, ancestors of the soldiers are present.
Neither the UDC or the SCV are racist organizations. The membership includes ancestors of white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other Confederate soldiers. These are heritage organizations, not hate groups.
While I am a Vietnam War veteran, my Dad was a WW2 veteran, and my son is an Iraqi war veteran, we give honor to all our ancestors. I had ancestors from Tennessee who were Confederates and ancestors from Kentucky who were Union soldiers, as well as Confederate soldiers. I honor them all.
The continuing attempt to wipe all vestiges of Southern heritage and history needs to cease. Please oppose this legislation at every step.
JUST REPORTED ON A TV STATION IN NORTH CAROLINA
MATTHEWS, N.C. - A North Carolina woman said she is taking a stand against a neighbor over the Confederate flag.
Alexa Rice told WCNC that she was riding her bike home from work when she noticed a truck in her neighborhood that had a Confederate flag sticker on its window.
After going home, Rice thought about how angry she was and decided to go back and remove the sticker.
Rice recorded herself taking the sticker off of the truck and replacing it with a note that said:
"The Confederate flag is inherently racist. Under this flag, the South fought to defend slavery. This version of the flag was reinstated in the segregation era, again to defend racism. I don't care if it's your "heritage," racism is nothing to be proud of. "
The note Rice placed on the car has since been removed. WCNC went door-to-door to try to find the owner of the truck, but no one was available for comment.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
YES, we are still giving a FREE eBook (PDF) copy of the book The Truth About the Confederate Flag to everyone who visits the website - so tell your friends - and your enemies!
www.dixieheritage.weebly.com
Until next week,
Deo Vindice!
Chaplain Ed
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