In Caledonia, the trucks slowly trickled into Ola J. Pickett Park on Confederate Drive with their Confederate battle flags furling in the breeze.
Saturday morning’s “Rebel Ride” — a gathering to show support for the Confederate battle flag and in its placement in Mississippi’s flag — was organized by a slender, middle-aged man in a flannel jacket. He flew three Confederate battle flags tied to tree branches and a “Don’t Tread on Me” banner behind his Toyota pickup. He declined to give his name to The Dispatch.
Caledonia does not issue permits to groups wanting to use the public park, but Mayor Bill Lawrence said he had given the group permission to assemble at the town’s park Saturday.
Around 20 people trickled in between 9 and 10 a.m., flying their flags behind pickups and motorcycles. Many said they felt the recent campaign against the flag, sparked by the June shooting deaths of nine members of a historically black congregation South Carolina, is unfairly targeting the banner as a symbol of hate.
“All I know is politicians need to stick to politics and leave history alone,” Archie Osborn said. “It’s history, not a myth.”
Osborn, 63, of Columbus, donned a “White History Matters” T-shirt to the gathering. He said he had been planning on coming to the Rebel Ride for about two weeks. He said many of those gathered Saturday also took a 450-mile round-trip ride in support of the battle flag to Shiloh, Tennessee, in August. Rick Dickson, who was part of the August ride, said about 200 people participated.
Osborn and Rickson said as the ride goes on, they expect more people to join in. The group was planning to ride from Caledonia to Amory and loop through western Alabama.
“It ain’t racial, it’s just heritage,” Dickson said.
The riders spanned multiple generations.
Jake Coker, 16, got his driver’s license in August. Saturday he fitted his truck with an American flag and a Confederate battle flag to join the ride.
“Everybody is acting like it’s a racist symbol now, but I don’t think it is,” Coker said. “I just think it’s southern pride.”
Dr. Trent Brown, a Brookhaven native and associate professor of American Studies at Missouri University of Science and Technology, in an interview with The Dispatch last week, said it is not a surprise that Confederate symbols have such large staying power in Mississippi and across the South.
Brown has written several books on white Southern culture. He said Confederate symbolism has been ingrained in Mississippi since Reconstruction and noted the battle flag was placed in the state flag in the 1890s.
“There have been other public displays of Confederate symbolism for about 125 years,” he said. “That’s about when Confederate memorials began to go up in courthouse squares and around the state. I think that one of the forces that’s driving the issue currently is the public display of the images. What we’ve got is, black voices in Mississippi and progressive voices of other races saying, ‘Look, the flag is not neutral. It doesn’t mean something generic about heritage or history or the past. It’s not really about pride when it’s displayed publicly.'”
Brown said the long term use of the flag by businesses, musicians and even youth sports teams through the 1990s makes the issue difficult, because it does remind many white Mississippians of home without considering the white supremacy aspect.
“The fact that the flag and confederate symbolism has been publicly used for so long in Mississippi is part of the reason I think the issue has such a hold,” Brown said. “It has been around for a long time. The problem that defenders of the current flag face — and I’m speaking here as a Mississippian and an academic observer — is that from the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan and other groups that were opposed to black political progress and participation have chosen the flag as well, as a symbol of themselves and what they believe in.”
The riders assembled at Ola J. Pickett Park Saturday said they felt attempts to remove the flag were attempts to erase the area’s past.
“Some idiots that used the confederate flag as their symbol kill and steal, but that has nothing to do with the flag,” said Ginni Bailey of Lowndes County, who rode her motorcycle to join the group. “It’s sad they want to take away history.”
Brown believes that a new push to remove the flag from public spaces has caused people to cling more tightly to it.
“For a long time, when people simply didn’t hear black discomfort with the flag or Confederate symbolism, it was easy to think this is a symbol that represents ‘us,’ ‘we are comfortable with it,'” Brown said. “I think there have always been black southerners who would have said, ‘Look, this means something different to us.’ But black opinion about the flag simply didn’t matter for a long time, and now it does in a way that it didn’t a generation or two ago.”
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