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November 2001
It was still flying two summers ago, when the NAACP and other black leaders, frustrated that their repeated complaints about the flag had led nowhere, called for an economic boycott of the state. It began on New Year's Day of 2000. Thousands of people canceled vacations to Myrtle Beach and Charleston, and performers including Destiny's Child, Patti LaBelle, and the choreographer Bill T. Jones pulled out of appearances in the state. An NAACP-sponsored march at the state capitol attracted 50,000 chanting protesters. Last May the legislature finally reached a tense compromise to end the boycott voting to move the flag from atop the dome to a Civil War memorial on the capitol grounds. The flag debate in South Carolina made headlines around the country, but it was watched with particular interest in Georgia and Mississippi, where the Confederate emblem still flew above official buildings. Last year the governors of those states began taking steps to resolve the flag issue, hoping to avoid a boycott. As in South Carolina, the Confederate flag--which continues to be seen by most blacks as a symbol of slavery and racism, and by many whites as a representation of Southern valor--has had a long and complicated history in those two states. But the dilemma they faced was different in one key respect. In South Carolina, the Confederate flag had been flying as a third standard, below the United States and South Carolina flags. The question there had been difficult but direct: pull down the Confederate flag or keep it aloft. In Georgia and Mississippi, the "stars and bars" of the Confederacy had been incorporated into the design of the states' official flags. (The emblem was added to the Georgia flag in 1956, partly as a reaction to the Supreme Court's backing of school desegregation in the Brown vs. Board of Education case. The Mississippi flag dates from 1894.) So in those states, a decision to remove the Confederate cross would mean producing a new version of the state flag. In other words, whereas the argument in South Carolina over the flag had been essentially political, in Georgia and Mississippi it also became a design story.
On a bright Friday morning in May, I accompanied Alexander to a modest ceremony in a downtown Atlanta parking lot. He picked me up at my hotel in a beige Toyota Camry, and we drove--haltingly, because Alexander's eyesight is not what it used to be--the dozen or so blocks to the two-story brick headquarters of the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA). The GMA, many of whose members are prominent in Atlanta business circles and played key roles in the effort to get the flag approved, had invited him to speak before it raised the new flag on a pole outside its headquarters. A few minutes early, we found a parking space near the entrance to the building. As he peered into the rearview mirror and reknotted his tie, Alexander told me a story about Yale University, where he enrolled as an undergraduate in the late 1930s. "When I got there," he said, "there was one black on the entire campus, a graduate student. One day I played catch football with him on Old Campus. I wrote a note to my father about it. My father was a gentleman. He would never say anything rude to any black person, but at the same time he thought they 'ought to be in their place.' He wrote back and said, 'That's fine, but that sort of thing doesn't go in Atlanta.'" Alexander first came up with his design in 1993, when the governor at the time, Zell Miller, began an unsuccessful effort to change the state flag in advance of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. When the issue resurfaced last year, Alexander pulled his design out of a drawer and took it to Governor Barnes, who immediately recognized its potential as a vehicle for political compromise. The centerpiece of Alexander's flag is the Georgia state seal, laid against a blue background. Below the seal are the words "Georgia's History" and a gold ribbon with tiny representations of the five flags that have flown in sovereignty over the state. Below that, running along the bottom edge, is the phrase "In God We Trust." One of the five flags on the ribbon, of course, is the 1956 state flag, which is dominated by the Confederate cross. This feature is what gave Alexander's design its political viability: although greatly diminished in size and prominence, the Confederate emblem is given a place of honor on the flag below the words "Georgia's History."
As Alexander stood in the parking lot autographing small reproductions of the new flag, most of the crowd filtered back inside the GMA offices. A spread of miniature muffins, fruit, grape juice, and coffee was waiting. I piled some food on a paper plate and sat down next to Doug Alexander, who is Cecil's son and serves on the Atlanta city council. He told me about the days in January when Governor Barnes, a Democrat, was working fervently to get the flag bill passed. "He had a war room going," he said. "He was calling in all his IOUs. He had people like Johnny Isakson, from Cobb County, down here in Atlanta calling up his fellow Republicans and urging them to vote for changing the flag." Working quickly and without fanfare, Barnes assembled a coalition that included black politicians, legislators from the mostly Republican suburbs around Atlanta, and corporate leaders. Atlanta is home to the headquarters of several major multinational corporations, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Holiday Inn. Barnes knew that their executives were eager to avoid the kind of press coverage that had followed the NAACP's boycott announcement in South Carolina. Already there were rumblings of a similar campaign in Georgia. Martin Luther King III, the late civil rights leader's son and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had demanded that the 2002 college basketball championships, the "Final Four," be moved from Atlanta's Georgia Dome if the state didn't change its flag. |
