The night he “drove old Dixie down” would be a fitting epithet to be chiseled on the grave marker of the white supremacist gunman who opened fire during a Bible study and killed nine church members of the Emanuel church in Charleston. It’s ironic that instead of advancing his hate filled agenda his actions have caused a cataclysmic change in the way many people look at the Confederacy and its symbolic flag. For the great majority, they didn’t like what they saw.
Still, GOP presidential candidates who should have led on this issue were dumbfounded and afraid to speak out lest they might offend any racist SC GOP primary voters. They dodged and weaved for days until the pressure became so great on South Carolina to remove the flag from the Capital grounds that Gov. Nikki Haley had to rush to the microphones on Monday to tell the world that she was going to ask the legislature to finally remove the Confederate flag.
An amazingly predictable thing happened next. One by one, most GOP presidential candidates marched to the nearest TV camera to announce that they too now supported the removal of the Confederate flag. The winds had changed and the Clown Car candidates quickly used their mobile Etch-a-Sketch devices to tack with the changing breeze.
Walmart, followed quickly by eBay, Sears, Amazon and other retailers announced that they were banning the sale of Confederate flag merchandise. Even NASCAR, home of the “good old boys” said they too were banning the Confederate flag. All of this has happened in less than 7 days after the Charleston church killings. It’s incredibly sad that it took a horrific tragedy and 150 years since the end of the Civil War to get to this point.
As the racist gunman sits in jail, hopefully for the rest of his miserable life, I hope he realizes what his legacy just might be. His racist motivated murder of innocent church members has galvanized not only Charleston but the entire nation and has resulted in the Confederate flag being identified for what it truly represents – the Confederate cause for white supremacy.
With the Confederate flag finally being taken down in Charleston with the promise of other states following suit with their own Confederate statues and symbols, the Charleston gunman may just have been the person who, in terms of the Confederacy, “drove old Dixie down”.