I was born during the war, and brought up in the War. I was born in 1942, and my father was wearing the uniform of the United States Army Air Corps. When I was a baby he was in North Africa and Italy. I was three years old when World War II ended. But I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, when the Civil War was still going on. The Boys in Gray furled their flags and took down the Stainless Banner in 1865, but that was not the end of it. (It was also called the "War between the States.")

It's very difficult for me to express what the mentalité was that I had and that I grew up in, but it's even more difficult for people to overcome their prejudicial view of anyone who grew up in the South back then, or even today. Look at movies and TV shows about Southerners, and they’re all portrayed as ignorant, bigoted hillbillies or mean prejudiced people. That’s because the people who made those movies and TV shows are all bigoted, mean-spirited and supercilious Liberals, mostly Yankees.

When I was in elementary school, we started every day off by reading a scripture, saying the Lord's prayer, saying the pledge of allegiance to the flag, which was on the right hand corner of the blackboard, then turning to face the Confederate flag on the left hand corner of the blackboard and singing "Dixie."

When I was in the sixth grade, we learned all of Stephen Foster's songs. I went to Stephen Foster Elementary School in Gainesville. We moved to Jacksonville, on Green Street first, and then to King Street, and I always regretted that when I was ready for high school we moved to Arlington, because on King Street I was headed for Robert E. Lee High School. From an early age I revered General Robert E. Lee.

When we went to football games, we stood when they raised the American flag, and as it went slowly up the pole we sang with all our hearts "The Star-spangled Banner." (First verse only.) Then the very second it was over, automatically, everybody sang "Dixie" —then when it ended everybody gave the “Rebel yell.”

I was taught to reverence the memory of the "Boys in Gray"; and the monument to the Sons of the Confederacy, the soldiers fallen in the Civil War battles, was a beautiful part of most city parks and squares. Cemeteries had little Confederate flags on many of the old graves.

That flag, the battle flag of the Confederacy, was a treasure of heritage to me. I grew up with it. Nowadays people see it who don’t have my background and they think KKK, or neo-Nazis and skinheads; or they think it stands for an approval of bigotry, prejudice, hatred, even slavery. In a way, that flag has been sullied by stupid, small-minded people, like those in the present-day KKK or the skinheads. And they are certainly not all, not even most, Southerners. Or to use a modern word, that flag has been “co-opted,” like the rainbow, which stands for God’s covenant and our obligation to keep the commandments, that has come to mean acceptance of sexual perversion.

But to me the Confederate flag—the Stars and Bars, the Stainless Banner, or the Battle Flag—still evokes a thrill of the kind of pride I also feel for the Stars and Stripes. It’s a patriotic feeling. My feelings for that flag do not diminish at all my feeling for the American flag, nor for the country for which it stands. It would be the same thing as someone who reveres their state’s flag as well as the flag of the United States. In fact, there is all the more reverence for the Stars and Stripes than for the Confederate flag.

To me that flag never stood for slavery. It was never a pro-slavery, pro-bigotry, pro-hatred symbol. It was a symbol representing a tradition, a heritage, a region, a culture, a language. And when men carried it freshly made into battle in the Civil War, it didn’t mean they were fighting for slavery. If any man of them thought that, it would only have been a handful in an army of thousands—as many historians have noted.

Rather, to those Boys in Grey it stood for loyalty to home and family, and a way of life. It stood for the right of self-determination and a struggle against domineering oppression. It stood for states’ rights, for home and for family.

I didn’t know much history when I was a teenager thrilled to see that flag wave; but I certainly didn’t think of slavery or prejudice. It didn’t mean I wanted to bring back slavery; it didn’t mean I was sad the days of slavery were over. Slavery never was associated in my mind with that flag. Yes, I was naïve in many ways about a lot of things, but I also saw that my peers, the kids around me in school who stood and cheered the Confederate flag, thought about it kind of the same way as I did. I never heard anybody say different. Nobody I knew thought of slavery as anything but evil and heinous, no matter who might be the slave. But we all felt a pride of place, of people, in that flag.

Now, many people who did not grow up understanding what that flag means, want to ban it, eradicate it from history, and blot it out of my heritage. That flag is not a swastika. The Boys in Grey—the Confederate soldiers—were civil and disciplined when they marched into towns or villages or farms. They were by and large respectful, and did as little harm as possible, as an army, by general orders, to the populace. This is noted by many historians, and contrasted to the Union soldiers. There was no equivalent by the Confederate soldiers to what the Yankees did, especially General Sherman as he marched through Georgia to the sea, with his campaign of total destruction. The Confederate flag does not stand for destruction and pillaging. It does not stand for pogroms, concentration camps, SS or brown-shirts, like the swastika. There is no vile culture to be removed by removing the Confederate flag and its tradition, as with denazification and the swastika. Banning the Confederate flag, removing it from tradition and history, is more like the Soviet edicts against Christians when they banned worship, imprisoned and executed thousands of priests, and burned thousands of churches or turned them into barns.

At the end of WWII in Europe there were the Nuremberg trials. At the end of the Civil War, upon hearing the news of the cessation of hostilities, President Lincoln asked the United States Army Band to play “Dixie.” What a contrast.

The Conquered Banner

Furl that Banner for ‘tis weary,

Round its staff ‘tis drooping dreary,

Furl it, fold it, it is best...

For there’s not a man to wave it.

And there's not a man to wave it.

In the blood that heroes gave it,

And its foes now scorn and brave it,

Furl it, hide it, let it rest.

My great grandmother told of when she was a little girl fleeing out to Talbot Island to escape the murder and rapine and "total war" of Sherman's Yankees. They went through Georgia to the sea, and to Jacksonville, where they fought a skirmish and burned the city. Talbot Island was an island in the sea, out from the mouth of the St. John's River, a safe haven.

When I saw Yankees, they were tourists coming from New York or New Jersey, and their manners (or rather lack of), and their rough speech and brusque, rude ways convinced me that everything I'd ever heard about Yankees was true.

People now stereotype me and Southerners as racially bigoted—that is, as possessing a hatred of blacks and a penchant to mistreat them. But I was always taught, in very pointed ways, to respect them and treat them kindly and with courtesy. And looking back, even though there was a great gulf between black and white—including separate bathrooms and drinking fountains in Woolworth's—and even some antinomic antipathy, there was also a sort of symbiotic understanding.

Once I was talked into going with a schoolmate to his father's work after school and getting a ride home with him instead of taking the school bus home. We lived in Arlington, on the east side of the St. John’s River, and in a new area of subdivisions, and there was not yet a school ready for us. I think I was in the ninth grade. We were bussed across the Matthews Bridge, over the St. John's River, to a school right in the middle of a black area of town. (In the days of segregation, there was "colored town" and no whites lived there, and no blacks lived in white neighborhoods. The lines were quite distinct. But when I was ten or eleven we lived on King Street, and I remember that only a few blocks away, across the creek, there were colored people in their unpainted shanties.)

So this boy and I didn't get on the school bus one afternoon to go home. Instead, we started walking toward the St. John’s River and then toward the place where Fords came off the ships to be sent to dealerships all over Florida and half of Georgia. (We used to say "He looked everywhere. He looked all over hell and half of Georgia," because that denigrated Georgia, which we were wont to do.) That's where the boy's father worked, for Ford Motor, unloading the ships.

On the way, we were walking along railroad tracks, minding our own business, actually lost to ourselves and not paying any attention to anything else, when a rock the size of a big potato clacked right near us. We turned around and saw about five black boys throwing rocks at us—rocks they picked up from the rail bed, rocks that had been imported, since Florida didn't have any rocks at all. We started running, and the rocks were flying all around us, and they were chasing us. Along to the left of us was a long dike, about ten feet high, and on the other side was a huge field of dried, caked, cracked mud—sludge dredged up from the bottom of the St. John's River to make the channel deeper for the bigger ships. My friend said, "Let's go up and over." So we did, and we took a running leap out onto the open field of mud, with cracks four and five inches deep. We sank up to our knees. We couldn't move. The colored boys came up over the top of the dike and had handfuls of rocks, that they commenced to throw at us. Those rocks sank down past that first half inch of powdery, dried mud into the thick, black, gooey stuff we were stuck in. Where the rocks, hit the goo curled out like cake icing around the place where the rock sank in. We yelled and asked them why they were trying to hit us. (Actually I don't remember that either one of us ever got hit with one of the hundred rocks they threw.) They said they thought we were the white boys that had ruined their kites, or something. We said we weren't. We hadn't ever been here before. So they quit, and said, "Well, OK then." And they helped us out, and they went back, and we went on.

I believe I had prejudicial contempt for Yankees rather than for blacks.

But time can blur your perceptions, especially if you don't want to admit some peccadilloes.