Four reasons for Labor to cheer in the South: UAW wins in Tennessee, West Virginia coal boss found guilty, populist Democrat wins governor's race in Louisiana, and firefighters organize in Laurel, Mississippi - PLUS ADDENDUM: NLRB charges Nissan with violating workers' rights in Mississippi plant

 

Labor activists and other progressive folks in the South have four new reasons to cheer: a United Auto Workers victory in Chattanooga, the rare criminal conviction of a coal mining boss in connection with the death of miners who worked for him; the victory of a populist Democrat in Louisiana’s gubernatorial race, and a union victory in Laurel, Mississippi.

All four events took place in recent weeks. Whether they signal more changes to come remains uncertain, but we’ll take good news wherever we find it, won’t we?

UAW wins historic vote at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga

Nearly three-fourths of the skilled trades workers—71 percent--at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted to join the UAW in a December 3 & 4 election. The victory sent shock waves across the corporate South, where CEO’s like Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn thought he’d found non-union heaven and anti-worker politicians like Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., thought their Valentine’s Day 2014 demagoguery in the UAW’s previous Chattanooga election had nailed the union’s coffin shut in their state.

I keep telling my pessimism-prone labor friends that you’ve got to keep a long view and remember that labor was on its knees once before—the 1920s—just prior to its historic rise in the 1930s to become a major force in American society. I grew up in the segregated South and wondered whether we’d ever get rid of Jim Crow. I later lived in West Germany and remember thinking that the Berlin Wall would never come down. Those are reasons why I’m today often the last optimist in the room!

According to Reuters, the 164 skilled trades workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant represent 11 percent of the total 1,450 hourly workforce. A Volkswagen appeal of last week’s election likely will get no sympathy from the National Labor Relations Board.

The UAW victory marks the first union victory in a foreign-owned plant in what is called “Detroit South”. It comes nearly two years after the union lost a 712-626 vote for bargaining rights at the plant. That vote came even though Volkswagen claimed it was open to union representation at the plant.

However, low and mid-level managers at the Chattanooga plant openly worked against the union in the February 2014 election, and Haslam, Corker and other Tennessee politicians, along with national groups like Grover Norquist’s conservative Americans for Tax Reform, fought vigorously against it. Both Haslam and Corker were caught in public lies regarding their anti-union activity.

In the aftermath of the February 2014 vote, Volkswagen and the UAW began exploring the idea of establishing a European-style works council at the plant.

Last December, Volkswagen certified the UAW for top tier representation in labor policy there, which must have caused a lot of lost sleep for the anti-union, mysteriously funded American Council of Employees. The ACE wanted that top tier representation solely for itself as a means of keeping the UAW out. In actuality, the ACE only exists as a counterweight to the UAW, and it would mostly likely cease to exist the moment the UAW left town.

Coal industry boss Don Blankenship is GUILTY

Former Massey Energy Chief Executive Donald L. Blankenship conspired to violate federal safety standards at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, where 29 workers died in a 2010 explosion. That was the verdict of a jury of 12 that also exonerated Blankenship of three additional felony charges related to the incident.

The misdemeanor conviction can lead up to only one year in prison, and Blankenship was never accused of what the New York Times called “direct responsibility for the deaths,” but the symbolic victory of having the coal industry’s first top executive actually tried and found guilty in connection to miners’ deaths is huge.

Federal prosecutors claimed Blankenship was responsible for 835 mine safety violations at the Upper Big Branch mine between 2008 and 2010. Blankenship retired from his position at Massey in 2010.

Populism gets another ride in Louisiana!

Louisiana may have the strongest populist tradition in the South. This is the state that elected Depression-era populist Huey Long governor and U.S. senator before his assassination in 1935. Louisiana voters would go on to elect Huey Long’s populist brother Earl Long governor three times and fellow traveler Edwin Edwards four times as governor.

In another shock to conservatives across the South, state Rep. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, defeated conservative Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter in the November 21 gubernatorial race. Edwards won by a commanding 12 percent over the scandal-ridden Vitter, becoming the only Democratic governor in the once solidly Democrat Deep South.

Edwards, conservative on some social issues, is a progressive populist on economic issues. His message resonated with voters sick of Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal’s disastrous leadership of the state, a leadership that endangered education and health care while Jindal sought the national limelight as a short-lived presidential candidate.

A legacy of Huey Long is that governors in Louisiana have more power than most governors. Edwards has pledged to expand Medicaid, support public schools, and roll back government give-aways to big corporations in an effort to secure greater tax fairness.

The dreaded (by Republicans, local newspaper editors, and Fox News watchers) spectre of labor unionism rises again in Laurel, Mississippi!

Laurel, Mississippi, site of the recent political battle over workers’ low wages at government subsidy-rich Howard Industries, is again on the labor frontlines as 80 percent of local firefighters have agreed to join a reorganized Local 207 of the Laurel Firefighters Association.

Chartered in 1919 as part of the International Association of Firefighters, the union endeared itself to the community for years not only for its support of its members’ safety and good working conditions but also for its Christmas toy drive for needy children and other community events.

A decline in membership in the early years of the new century led to the local’s near extinction, but new life has been breathed into a reorganized local and its 49 members.

This blog has closely followed another development in Laurel over the past year, the controversy over giant Howard Industries. The producer of electrical transformers has long been the beneficiary of politicians’ largesse—tax breaks, subsidies totaling at least $60 million, a $20 million bond issue from the county.

Yet many of the 4,000-employee company’s predominantly black workforce have complained of low wages for their grueling work and an obstinate management that 16 meetings failed to budge. A union-backed study showed workers there earn just 61 percent what workers at a similar plant in Crystal Springs, Miss., earn.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 1317, represents approximately half the workforce at Howard Industries.

The Laurel City Council voted 5-1 in favor of the workers in July 2015, but pressures from the company, local leadership and local newspaper likely contributed to a reversal of that vote in August.

Recall that Howard Industries was the site of the largest raid against undocumented workers in the history of the United States. In the 2008 raid, the federal government  

arrested hundreds of migrant workers at the plant.

ADDENDUM: NLRB Charges Nissan with workers' rights violations in Canton, Miss.

The National Labor Relations Board has filed charges against Nissan for violating workers' rights at its Canton, Miss., plant by keeping them from wearing clothing with pro-union logos to work.

According to the Associated Press, the company instituted a uniform policy in 2014 at its plants in Mississippi and Tennessee that effectively prevented them from wearing clothing with a pro-union logo or message. The United Auto Workers, which has been organizing at the Canton, Miss., plant for several years, made the complaints that led to the charges.

Pro-union workers at the plant had been wearing T-shirts proclaiming their views. The company's 2014 uniform policy called on workers to wear company-issued shirts and pants. A Nissan spokesman told the Associated Press that the policy was not mandatory.

The NLRB also filed charges against Kelly Services, which supplies Nissan with temporary workers at the Canton plant.

UAW Secretary Gary Casteel told the AP that the NLRB only filed charges in roughly 6 percent of the 20,000 worker complaint cases that it received in 2014.

The tango lives on in Argentina--in its politics as well as in its streets and tango halls

 

(Enrique Santos Discépolo)

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Enrique Santos Discépolo, supreme poet and lyricist of the tango, once penned these words:

Don’t you see, you poor fool

That whoever’s got the most dough is right?

That honor’s sold for cash, and morals for pennies?

That no truth can withstand two bucks?

The tango is more than a dance. “Nostalgic and forlorn, viewing time present as a misfortune, the tango reflected a total style of life,” writes author Robert D. Crassweller in his sweeping Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina, “a psychology, a creative sensibility that nevertheless expressed the viewpoint of the loser with a fatalism recalling the Moorish strain in the Creole heritage.”

(To the right, tango in the Confitería Ideal)

I thought about such things as I recently wandered Calle Florida and the other streets, boulevards and plazas of this fascinating city, listened to tango in the ancient Café Tortoni, and danced it in the century-old Confitería Ideal.

(To the left, tango in the Café Tortoni)

I thought about them while reading the newspapers, too, with voters lining up to choose between the Peronist Daniel Scioli and the neo-liberal Mauricio Macri for president. Twelve years of Kirchnerismo—the pro-worker, neo-Peronism of the late Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cristina—were coming to an end, and the question was whether Argentina’s fragile economy will continue to march forward from the disastrous bankruptcy and depression of 2001 or turn back the clock to those bad old days.

Macri, the well-do-do former businessman-turned-mayor of Buenos Aires, won the election, but the ghosts and legacies of Juan Peron and the Kirchners will haunt him if he attempts to implement the “austerity” politics that helped get Argentina into trouble in the first place.

I talked to workers along Calle Florida who were passing out anti-Macri literature. Hernan Pose and Rodolfo Olmos, both members of the CTA (Central de trabajadores de la Argentina) workers organization, told me they worried about the conservative Macri’s policies on public education, immigration, debt and credit issues.

(To the right, Argentine workers Hernan Pose on the left and Rodolfo Olmos on the right)

Argentina was an early victim of global neo-liberal business practices that take productive companies and run them into bankruptcy by saddling them with huge, unpayable debt while enriching the corporate pirates who ran them and as well as those who buy and sell them and blame the workers for their problems.

This story is eloquently told in Sin Patrón, a book by the Lavaca Collective (a worker-run collective of journalists in Argentina) about how workers themselves took over approximately 170 such companies in the early 2000s and brought them back to life.

Argentina was once one of the six richest countries in the world. Vast with its own “Wild West” history that includes the elimination of native cultures as a cost of the land’s Europeanization, this is a country that saw itself as a potential global leader, not an economic basket case.

There is a sense of unfulfilled mission in Argentina. Its most famous politicians, Juan Perón and his wife Evita, created hope in many of a glorious future, but in their wake came a brutal dictatorship and ongoing divisions between Perónists and anti-Perónists.

The tango can be heard everywhere in Buenos Aires. It’s in the streets as well as the old halls where the great tango king Carlos Gardel, “El Zorzal Criollo” (“The Creole Thrush”), used to sing. Nostalgic and fatalistic, indeed, but glorious, too, and mysterious with the potential of all mysteries for either good or bad.

I’ll return soon to Argentina in another column that will look at the country’s open-door policies toward immigration.

Tav Falco: expatriate torchbearer of Memphis music, the artist as outsider with a clear view of what's inside

 

(To the left, Tav Falco with yours truly in Memphis)

 MEMPHIS – Tav Falco, enfant terrible of the 1980s, still the provocateur and “psychobilly” master, walked onto the stage at Lafayette’s Music Room here, dressed in black, his hair a Nuevo-‘50s coif, picked up his guitar and let loose.

I listened from the balcony to an indictment of ethnic arrogance.

             
These people don’t look like us—they don’t smell like us
We are the masters of their miserable fate
For mercy they get down on their knees to pray
But we’re superior in every way—they’re insects in every way
It's doomsday baby

Falco was the Antonin Artaud of the Memphis punk and post-punk scene who in his first performance in the late 1970s took a chainsaw to his guitar and sliced it into pieces before passing out on stage. But no longer must he bear insults such as when local TV host Marge Thrasher told him his band Panther Burns’ just-finished gonzo performance of Johnny Burnett’s “The Train Kept A Rollin’” “may be the worst sound I’ve heard come out on television.”

Falco’s live-TV response to her insult was Tom Waits-precious: “Well, the best of the worst is what we’re after.”

(To the right, Tav Falco performing in Mempis)

 “The artist, he is never really on the inside,” the Arkansas native told me in one of two recent telephone interviews he gave me while on his just-ended cross-country tour, a tour that included stops in Clarksdale as well as Memphis. “He can see what is happening on the inside, but he moves around on the outside. … He’s never quite assimilated.”

Falco today is an expatriate living in Vienna, Austria, another river town, a Memphis-like outpost on the Danube River where money and profits “are not the defining criteria” of the artist.

Even when Falco was living in Memphis and performing with legends like Jim Dickinson and Big Star leader Alex Chilton, he stood apart, a “torchbearer” of the city’s music at its post-Sun and post-Stax nadir yet bringing to it what writer Robert Gordon called “country blues … with a punk aesthetic.”

He named his band Panther Burns after the Mississippi Delta town, which got its name from a troublesome panther whose ungodly shrieks after being caught and burned alive are still supposed to haunt the nights there. The band played everything from rockabilly to tango.

“As far as punk aesthetic, I never ascribed to that,” Falco told me. “I am just a working artist. I don’t ascribe to these labels. I use the term rock ‘n’ roll to cover a broad spectrum.”

Along with his “Whistle Blower” tour, Falco has just released a new album, Tav Falco: Command Performance, and a new book of his early black-and-white photographs, An Iconography of Chance: 99 Photographs of the Evanescent South. Some of these photographs also appeared in Falco’s monumental 2011 book, Ghosts Behind The Sun: Splendor, Enigma & Death, a surreal history of Memphis in which Falco, as alter-ego Eugene Baffle, travels through time alongside figures as diverse as General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Machine Gun Kelly.

A noted filmmaker and actor as well as musician, photographer and author, Falco acknowledged his art has taken on a new edge, overtly socially conscious and acutely aware of injustices both here and abroad. “I’m all for art for art’s sake, but there comes a point where the artist, the rank-and-file artist citizen, can no longer remain silent, because silence is complicity.”

On his new album, the song “Whistle Blower” warns of a creeping fascism in American society where figures like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are hounded and punished for revealing the dark underbelly of the nation’s politics and policies. Another song, “Doomsday Baby”, is a broadside against Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians.

Falco said he’d like to return home someday but things stand in the way. “Arkansas is so crazy, so benighted and so fascist, I find it difficult to entertain that idea,” he said. “Arkansas used to be a marvelous place to live.”

           

Yet in some ways he has never left. Along with its protest songs, Tav Falco: Command Performance also includes paeans to Memphis and Southern music: Memphis Minnie’s “Me and My Chauffeur Blues”, Alex Chilton’s “Bangkok” and Charlie Feathers’ “Jungle Fever”. And his book of photographs, the first in a planned series of three, pays homage to an “evanescent South” that is always with him.

“There is a landscape that draws people … a social fabric,” he said.

He remembers his first trip from backwoods Arkansas to the big city of Memphis and hearing blues musicians such as the Memphis Jug Band, Napoleon Strickland, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Bukka White. “I was enthralled. … I saw how they mesmerized the audience and how the ladies and gentleman were throwing silver dollars at them.”

It’s not something an artist easily forgets.

This column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.

Labor needs an old-time revival in the South with preachers shouting a new gospel that champions working folks!

 

(To the right, a 1930s strike banner on display at the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in Tyronza, Ark.) 

I’ve long preached about the need for labor and progressives in general who want to win over the South to tap into a Southern tradition that doesn’t get much attention but which is every bit as real as those other, darker traditions that have held the region back much of its history. I’m talking about populism, real populism, not the faux kind pushed today by Fox News, but a rock-ribbed belief that blue-collar, small farmer, black and white and brown Southerners deserve their seat at the table and a voice in their lives.

You saw that tradition in Myrtle Lawrence, a white, uneducated, snuff-dipping sharecropper who became one of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union’s best organizers in the 1930s. She was a major force in rallying the poorest of the South’s poor to demand their rights as human beings, and to do it  she had to withstand the condescending snickering of white Northern liberals and Southern black activists as well as the threats of landowners and right-wing politicians.

Today, most Democrats are too weak-kneed and compromised to reach out to modern-day Myrtle Lawrences who might help turn around the region that spawned the poisonous Tea Party movement that is pushing the Republican Party even further to the right.

“Democrats should demand that Tea Party rebels explain why they are in league with a party that intends to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in order to finance more tax cuts for billionaires,” William Greider writes in the latest edition of The Nation. “If common folks ever understand the corrupt nature of the Republican coalition, we will see a popular rebellion that makes the present chaos look like, well, a tea party.”

The depth of that corruption can be seen in the current series running in the New York Times, “A `Privatization’ Of the Justice System’”, that details how corporations have sidetracked the nation’s judicial system into corporate-friendly arbitration in handling consumer and employee lawsuits and complaints.

“All it took was adding simple arbitration clauses to contracts that most employees and consumers do not even read,” reporters Jessica Silver Greenberg and Michael Corkery wrote. “Yet at stake are claims of medical malpractice, sexual harassment, hate crimes, discrimination, theft, fraud, elder abuse and wrongful death.”

The Democratic Party’s long record of cuddling up to labor during campaigns and generally ignoring it after the election shows that working people—whether in the South or beyond—cannot rely on mainstream political parties. A viable labor movement would do more than anything else to bring about real revolutionary change.

Labor organizer Tefere Gebre told Facing South’s Chris Kromm recently that organizing the South is crucial to labor’s future and to the region itself. “The South has become a dumping ground for the global multinationals. As Americans we feel offended that multinationals are seeking the South for cheap labor and unregulated labor and profiteering when they come and set up here.”

Gebre talked about a new focus by organized labor on major Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Orlando and Miami. All well and good, but more will be needed. The soul of the South has never been in its major cities. It’s out in the country and in the small towns and medium-sized cities. Labor and other  progressive groups have to reach the South’s soul.

Myrtle Lawrence and the STFU did. Their meetings “had come to resemble a southern evangelical revival more than a labor organization,” historian Elizabeth Anne Payne has written. “Women … gave testimony about the power of the STFU in Holiness style, witnessing that the Holy Spirit could instantly transform lives through the union.”

A revival. That’s what labor needs, and so does the South. Good preachers, too, and a gospel that champions regular working folks of all races and stands up to the dark, old, bankrupt traditions and ideas and their hypocrite apologists.

    

Labor South Roundup: Pols on the stump at an old-time political rally in rural Mississippi; Punk artist Tav Falco returns to Memphis: Guitarist Jimmie Vaughan makes every lick count at the "King Biscuit" blues festival in Helena, Ark.

 

(To the left, at Johnny Morgan's "Good Ole Boys and Gals" political rally in rural Mississippi)

A cultural excursion into the Deep South – Pols on the hustings at an old-time political rally in rural Mississippi; punk rocker-photographer-poet-filmmaker Tav Falco returns to Memphis; and Jimmie Vaughan channels Jimmy Reed at the Helena, Ark., “King Biscuit” blues festival

At the “Good Ole Boys and Gals” political rally in rural Lafayette County, Miss.

A couple hundred state and local courthouse pols gathered to give and hear stump speeches, sip bourbon and munch on barbecue chicken at Lafayette County Supervisor Johnny Morgan’s “Good Ole Boys and Gals” political rally near Oxford, Miss., Wednesday night.

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, up for re-election this year, told everyone how good he’d been for the Magnolia state over the past four years. Incumbents and challengers took turns bashing President Obama while the occasional brave soul called for an expansion of Medicaid and more spending on public education.

Morgan, a veteran politician and former state legislator, is chief organizer of the event, which takes place several times a year and always draws a large crowd. Peanuts, hoop cheese, delicious barbecue chicken, and a generous bar add to the festivities.

 Tav Falco returns to Memphis

(To the right, Tav Falco and Panther Burns performing in Memphis)

Tav Falco, a controversial, sometimes polarizing multi-media artist who burst onto the Memphis music and art scene with his band Panther Burns in the late 1970s, returned to his old stomping grounds last week with a performance with his band at Lafayette’s Music Room in the city’s Overton Square district.

Falco has been living in Europe—earlier Paris and now Vienna—for many years, and he included songs in French, a tango, as well as cuts from his new CD “Tav Falco Command Performance” for the crowd.

The CD is a paean to Memphis in some ways with renditions of rockabilly master Charlie Feathers’ “Jungle Fever”, Big Star leader Alex Chilton’s “Bangkok”, blues meister Memphis Minnie’s “Me and My Chauffeur Blues”. Also included is Falco’s own sharply political “Whistle Blower” with its warning against growing American-style fascism.

Falco also has a newly published book of his photography, An Iconography of Chance: 99 Photographs of the Evanescent South, that is getting attention here and in Europe. In a telephone interview this week, Falco said the book is the first of three that will include his photography. It features photographs he took of the South decades ago.

“There is a landscape that draws people, photographers, a social fabric,” Falco said about the South. “This is the area I grew up in, pictures of my formation, my aesthetic. An artist works with what is at hand. I think it is important where an artist works and lives.”

The next book in the series will “reflect a more international view,” he said.

Falco’s art—whether photographs, music, books or film--today reflects a continuing commitment to his own aesthetic, as described in his strange, fascinating, monumental 2011 book, Ghosts Behind The Sun: Splendor, Enigma & Death, volume one in a two-part series called Mondo Memphis:

“The image of the artist or musician as alchemist is utterly fascinating. Music—an unseen force—magic, the occult, and alchemy all seem to be interconnected. … The first thing I do when I go onstage is to cast a spell.”

Jimmie Vaughan at the Helena, Ark., “King Biscuit” blues festival

(Jimmie Vaughan in Helena, Ark.)

Veteran guitarist Jimmie Vaughan may offer a less complicated “aesthetic” to his music, but he is no less compelling. Brother of the late guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan is a master of simplicity with his playing. Each note says something, each lick lean and mean, never showing off, just what’s needed to send a message. In jazz terms, Jimmie is Miles Davis to his brother’s Charlie Parker.

Performing with long-term sidekick vocalist Lou Ann Barton, Vaughan offered a wide range of his music over the past several decades, tipping his hat to his late brother in his classic homage to dead-and-gone blues singers, “Six Strings Down”. He also played songs by greats such as Jimmy Reed, another preacher of the gospel of “simplicity” in music. “Who doesn’t love Jimmy Reed?” he asked the crowd. They shouted back an affirmation.

(To the right, a bluesman on Helena's Cherry Street during the "King Biscuit" blues festival)

Vaughan was the headliner of this month's blues festival, located in the heart of downtown Helena, Ark., where Sonny Payne’s famous “King Biscuit” radio show featured Sonny Boy Williamson and other blues great as far back as the 1940s.

Flag-waving Southern secessionists square off against anti-Rebel flag University of Mississippi students

Within minutes of a rally today by University of Mississippi students calling on the university to take down the state flag with its Confederate emblem, a group of Southern secessionists marched onto the scene waving giant Confederate battle flags and a sign calling on the South to "SECEDE".

A racially mixed crowd of 100 or so students and faculty had gathered by the pole carrying the state flag on the campus "Circle" to protest that last-remaining state flag that still includes a Confederate battle flag as part of the design. "Take it down! Take it down!" they chanted. The Circle is immediately in front of the university's historic Lyceum, site of the most intense shooting and rioting when James Meredith was enrolled as the university's first black student in 1962.

(To the right, the state flag flying on the campus "Circle" at the University of Mississippi)

As the rally began to come to a close, a small group of Confederate flag-waving whites--children as well as adults--marched onto the scene. Campus police came quickly to the scene as students from the rally began to shout at the group.

"Are you a racist?" one asked.

"Absolutely," said one of the flag-bearers, whose sign also indicated that he was a member of the Killen, Alabama-based League of the South, a Southern secessionist organization.

(University of Mississippi students and faculty calling for the university to stop flying the state flag on campus)

Other members of the group wore T-shirts with the sign "International Keystone Knights".

"You are leftist commies," a group member shouted at the students.

"Can you spell communism?" a student fired back.

"We are the blood of conquerers," another group member responded.

On the League of the South Web site today, group member Jeremy Walls filed a report of the incident and said this:

"I knew immediately there would be some problems with the crowd. Plenty of self-loathing whites were present along with the usual smattering of minorities. I couldn't help but wonder how many of these kids were from out of State and how many were residents. ... We are indeed being watched by the Marxist forces in the area. ... One thing is clear: Marxism is alive in Mississippi. We have much work to do here if we hope to hold the line in our fight for our ancestral homeland."

The choice of the University of Mississippi campus for today's confrontation is no accident. No university in the South was burdened by more Confederate symbolism after the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 than "Ole Miss". In fact, the vice presidential candidate on the Dixiecrat ticket that year was Mississippi Gov. Fielding Wright. The university has struggled in recent decades to divest itself of that symbolism, but never without intense protest.

Southern working-class folks have a reason to feel rebellious - they're just waving the wrong flag to show it

 

(To the right, Benny Wint)

MARSHALL, N.C. – Benny Wint grew up as one of the few whites in a black neighborhood of a small South Carolina town. Today, if customers come into his roadside stand with a racist attitude, he wants them to leave.

Yet what Wint sells at his roadside stand are Confederate flags--all kinds, from the traditional Beauregard battle flag to a Southern Cross with purple bars on a yellow background. He says he has black and Mexican customers as well as white.

“The Confederate flag means freedom, the right to do what you want to do,” says the 56-year-old, who has been selling the flags for nine years. “The right to do what you want to do is something you can’t do in this country any more.”

(Benny Wint's roadside stand near Marshall, N.C.)

What the flag evokes for many African Americans is the image of 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, gun in one hand, Confederate flag in the other, in a photograph taken before he allegedly walked into an historic black church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine people. What they see in that flag are Klan rallies, Jim Crow and slavery.

“The Confederacy and what it stands for is treason,” said Charles Steele Jr., who heads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta.

More than likely, a Wint ancestor fought under that flag in a war that killed more than 600,000 soldiers—a toll equivalent to 6 million with today’s population. One out of every four white Southern males between 16 and 45 years of age was either killed or disabled in the Civil War.

Southern apologists have long claimed that the war was about states’ rights, union aggression, trade disputes. The great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass would have none of it. “The very stomach of this rebellion is the negro in the form of a slave.”

Yet most of those white Southerners on the frontlines of the Civil War owned no slaves. In fact, the 1862 Confederate Conscription Act exempted well-to-do slave owners from serving in the military.  Southern dissension against the war was much more prevalent than so-called Southern heritage groups would have you believe.

This “is a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” North Carolina’s Civil War governor, Zebulon Vance, said. “The great popular heart is not now and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians and not the people.”

Yet the people fought that war to preserve slavery, the human property of the South’s rich elite. And they kept waving the war’s flag as Jim Crow loomed over the land, subjugating blacks once again and even many poor whites who also couldn’t afford the poll taxes levied to restrict voting.

Working-class white Southerners waved that Confederate flag into the 21st century while the successors of the Southern ante-bellum elite mouthed “Southern virtue” and kept the region the nation’s poorest.

The flag “is a sign of defiance, a sign of pride, a declaration of a geographical area that you’re proud to be from,” country singer Charlie Daniels has said.

Daniels is one of many Confederate flag-waving Southern musicians-- David Allan Coe, Hank Williams Jr., Lynyrd Skynyrd--whose music embodies a spirit of rebellion from the corporate norm in Nashville or New York.

I remember going to a concert by the ground-breaking rock group Buffalo Springfield in North Carolina in the mid-1960s. Fans yelled uproariously when the concert began with the unveiling of a giant Confederate flag across the back of the stage. However, those same fans then walked out in droves when Neil Young and other band members ventured into the long, mind-bending guitar riffs that foretold of the music that would later come from Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.

Like many blacks, working-class Southern whites feel alienated from much of U.S. society. Their wages stagnated while the earnings of the top 1 percent went through the roof. They’re fed Fox News’ race-tinged, anti-Obama, anti-Obamacare pablum 24 hours a day, yet the politicians Fox News pushes aren’t putting food on the table or gas in the car.

Unlike struggling blacks, working-class Southern whites don’t have a natural support base among Northern—or Southern—liberals or the Democratic Party, which today is nearly as dependent on corporate funding as the Republican Party and which has eschewed the working class in favor of identity politics.

They’ve got a right to feel rebellious. The problem is they’re waving the wrong flag to show it.

This column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.