No, it's not about Southern heritage

It was sheer coincidence that I walked into chaos.

Back in the summer of 2000, I’d been asked to interview for a job with a prestigious magazine based in Charlotte.

As it happened, my trip occurred over the last week of June and then the first weekend of July. My prospective employers gave me a couple of free days to check out the area, look at places to live and so forth.

Charlotte is right on the border of North and South Carolina, and I found myself attracted to a neat little village called Tega Cay on the South Carolina side — still just a 20-25 minute drive to the office in Charlotte.

On July 1, I found myself with lots of extra time. I’d read that it was an important day in South Carolina, because the Confederate battle flag was being lowered forever from the state capitol dome in Columbia.

WHY NOT drive down and watch a bit of history?

South Carolina, in case you didn’t know, was the first state to secede from the union (Dec. 24, 1860) and that flag was the last to fly atop a U.S. state capitol.

I’d never lived in the South, so I terribly underestimated the emotions involved with what seemed like a very logical change.

The Confederate flag symbolized slavery, pure and simple — it’s why the Civil War was fought — and I assumed the state was ready to move forward.

As we discovered recently in Charlottesville, however, racism and white supremacy do not die easily.

Heck, never mind Charlottesville. North Idaho is all too familiar with the vicious hate espoused by Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations.

So I was a bit naïve when I parked in Columbia and walked several blocks to the statehouse.

Police were keeping two groups of people on opposite sides of the street — an angry mob of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads all armed with clubs, bats and what have you on one side, screaming at a relatively peaceful crowd celebrating South Carolina’s long-overdue break with the past.

Quite honestly, I was happy to get out of there in one piece.

NOW HERE we are, nearly two decades later, and the issue of Confederate flags, statues and memorials is back.

And yes, it’s still all code for white supremacy.

Most of those statues were erected in the 1930s and ’40s, when the South was re-fighting the Civil War with Jim Crow laws and blatant, violent racism.

These current Confederate images have never been about Southern heritage or culture. You can learn that heritage and culture by visiting museums, eating grits, watching SEC football, drinking sweet tea or simply saying, “Bless your heart.”

Just last week, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian and TV personality Jon Meacham spoke in Coeur d’Alene.

Meacham is a proud Southerner who was raised in Tennessee and earned his degree at the University of the South.

“TO ME, it’s very simple,” Meacham said. “There should not be monuments to those who took up arms against the Union.

“You hear that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had slaves, so how are they different? They were different because Washington and Jefferson were engaged in a search for ‘a more perfect Union.’

“Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were trying to destroy it. That’s not something that should be venerated.”

I agree.

Look, I have no problem with living in a state that is almost entirely white.

But I’d be sick, truly sick, if I ever felt for a second that I love it here because of that.

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Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press. Reach Steve at: scameron@cdapress.com.