Time will tell if furling the rebel flag means deeper change
[...] is it a sign of real change in a region known for fiercely defending its complex traditions, or simply the work of frightened politicians and nervous corporate bean counters scrambling for cover in the wake of another white-on-black atrocity?
"Taking down those flags is not that big a deal," he said of Gov. Nikki Haley's call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse lawn and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley's order Wednesday to take down four rebel banners from a memorial at his capitol.
[...] Darby, who has been fighting since 1999 to bring down the Confederate flag, said, I think it's a first step that hopefully will lead to real change.
Governors in Virginia and North Carolina say the battle flag should come off specialty license plates; Georgia has stopped issuing the plates, and a bill to do the same was introduced by a Tennessee legislator;
"Something dramatic happened — something tragic that stunned people," said Guillory, director of UNC's Program on Public Life.
[...] people said the same things in 1955, when 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, shot and tossed into a Mississippi river with a cotton gin motor around his neck.
Yes, those crimes helped galvanize the civil rights movement and pave the way for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.
[...] challenges to Jim Crow also prompted states like South Carolina to hoist the Confederate battle flag atop their capitol domes in defiance, said James C. Cobb, a professor of history at the University of Georgia.
"There were plenty of white Southerners all during the civil rights movement who knew deep down that supporting what was going on — not only supporting racial discrimination, but supporting violence and the kinds of forms of resistance that white Southerners were putting up — was wrong," said Cobb, author of the book "Away Down South," about the region's identity.
For proof of that change, Guillory said one need look no further than the floor of the South Carolina Senate, where on Tuesday Paul Thurmond, the son of Dixiecrat presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, called for the battle flag's removal.
Noting that many Confederate soldiers were fighting to preserve slavery, he added, "I am not proud of THIS heritage."
Beth Summers keeps a battle flag that once flew over the statehouse dome in a frame beside a sword an ancestor carried during the Civil War.
South Carolina legislators have voted to debate removing the flag from its place of honor on the statehouse grounds.
If nothing else, Guillory — whose school recently rechristened a building named for a former KKK leader — said removing the flags from the seats of government is eliminating a source of distraction in the political system...