Black Bibliography - Suggested Readings

This thought-provoking book offers moral and legal perspectives on the 2 legacies of the Civil War - the adoption of the Confederate battle flag by Southern states and the question of African American reparations.

As rancorous debates over Confederate symbols continue, Robert Bonner explores how the rebel flag gained its enormous power to inspire and repel. In the process, he shows how the Confederacy sustained itself for as long as it did by cultivating the allegiances of countless ordinary citizens. Bonner also comments more broadly on flag passions--those intense emotional reactions to waving pieces of cloth that inflame patriots to kill and die. Colors and Blood depicts a pervasive flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War in the Union as well as the Confederacy. Northerners and southerners alike devoted incredible energy to flags, but the Confederate project was unique in creating a set of national symbols from scratch. In describing the activities of white southerners who designed, sewed, celebrated, sang about, and bled for their new country's most visible symbols, the book charts the emergence of Confederate nationalism. Theatrical flag performances that cast secession in a melodramatic mode both amplified and contained patriotic emotions, contributing to a flag-centered popular patriotism that motivated true believers to defy and sacrifice. This wartime flag culture nourished Confederate nationalism for four years, but flags' martial associations ultimately eclipsed their expression of political independence. After 1865, conquered banners evoked valor and heroism while obscuring the ideology of a slaveholders' rebellion, and white southerners recast the totems of Confederate nationalism as relics of the Lost Cause. At the heart of this story is the tremendous capacity of bloodshed to infuse symbols with emotional power. Confederate flag culture, black southerners' charged relationship to the Stars and Stripes, contemporary efforts to banish the Southern Cross, and arguments over burning the Star Spangled Banner have this in common: all demonstrate Americans' passionate relationship with symbols that have been imaginatively soaked in blood.

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! is the most comprehensive history to date of the Confederate flag controversy that has engaged South Carolina politics for nearly four decades. Originally raised over the state capitol in 1961 to commemorate the centennial of the American Civil War, the flag remained atop the State House dome until July 2000. Failed negotiations and bitter confrontations between the flag's defenders and its opponents have made the "flag issue" a flash point of South Carolina politics and culture. Setting the stage for the political drama to come, K. Michael Prince places the Confederate battle flag--the flag most often displayed--in historical context, as one of many unit and national flags carried by Confederate forces. He also offers insights into the conflicting symbolism of these flags. For many citizens, usually white South Carolinians, the Confederate flag represents heroism, a fight for national survival, and a lost heritage, while many others, especially African Americans, view it as a symbol of oppression, violence, and human degradation. Prince tells the story from many perspectives, and the clashes between those boycotting South Carolina to force the flag's removal from the State House and those "defending it at the dome" make for fascinating reading. Even more interesting perhaps are the stories Prince tells of those seeking, ever more urgently in the 1990s, a political and social compromise that would free all South Carolinians--regardless of race, age, or ancestry--from narrowly partisan views of history. Empathetic toward both sides, Prince turns the participants' narratives into compassionate history and intriguing politics. His account of the legislative battle that led to the flag's removal from the State House dome is rendered in compelling detail. Readers not only learn about, but also sense, the anguish of legislators--black and white--forced to confront their personal and political convictions as they took a stand for or in opposition to the Old South that the flag represented. Facing a divisive past, South Carolinians and the General Assembly found their way to a compromise many hoped would begin to define their future. The fact that the NAACP continues to support a boycott of the state as long as the flag flies anywhere on the State House grounds testifies to the importance of the flag as a divisive symbol.

In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice, to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these flag wars reveal the profound - and still unhealed - schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War. The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battle-fields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.

See description for print copy above