Time to put an end to all this misplaced Confederate nostalgia

I don't think I never heard anyone speaking nostalgically about the Confederate States of America until I was 13 years old.

That was when my family moved from southwestern Ohio to Fairfax, Va., and it was quite a shock culturally. My father was a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton. He was offered a good promotion if he would relocate and work at the Pentagon.

My parents sold it to us as a move to Washington, D.C., and that sounded pretty exciting. I had no idea that our move to a community 15 miles outside the Nation's Capital would put us in a state that was still fighting the War Between the States.

It was more than eight years since the Supreme Court's Brown decision mandated school integration, but Virginia's Grand Poobah, Sen. Harry F. Byrd, had called for Massive Resistance and very few black children were attending integrated schools in 1963.

When I started the second semester of my eighth grade year at Sidney Lanier in Fairfax, I was stunned to hear kids call me a "damn Yankee" when they learned I was from Ohio. I couldn't believe it mattered. Of course we were halfway through the centennial celebration of the 1861-65 war.


Actually, the two high schools in Fairfax sort of epitomized the two sides of the wartime South. Fairfax High School was the Rebels, like the old coot in the license plate above carrying a battle flag and claiming that "the South will rise again." The other school, W.T. Woodson High School, was the Cavaliers, representing Ashley Wilkes and others like him from "Gone With the Wind." They supposedly fought the war to defend their honor and were less, well, common about it.

I don't recall ever seeing a Confederate flag displayed during my four years at Woodson. I think one reason for it was that our school -- more than Fairfax High -- was made up of kids from military families whose fathers worked at the many military installations in the area.

Even so, Woodson wasn't integrated at all till the fall of 1965, and we only had four black students -- two of them great basketball players -- that year. It was my senior year (1966-67) when Fairfax County finally shut down its separate and unequal school system. Nearly 300 of the 3,300 students that year were black.

Northern Virginia was never a hotbed of Lost Cause sentiment. The close-in counties became some of the richest in the country, and there just weren't a lot of guys sitting around chewing Red Man and complaining about civil rights.

Walt Disney Studios tried to make it look like something it wasn't with its horrible, highly fictionalized "Remember the Titans," a football movie that tried to make Alexandria, Va., look like it was out somewhere past Roanoke.

All the talk about rebel flags honoring heritage and other such nonsense doesn't hold water if you look at the history. During the first half of the 20th Century, the Stars and Bars battle ensign wasn't flown in most Southern states. In fact, it was in reaction to the civil rights movement that segregationists started -- as David Crosby might have said -- letting their freak flag fly.

There was no question it upset black people in the South to see the flag of their oppressors. And while neo-Confederates hate this comparison, it isn't far wrong to compare it to a Holocaust survivor having to look at swastika-covered flags while walking through Berlin.

Their defense is to whine about political correctness and say people should lighten up and get over it. Whether it was Native American genocide, or World War II internment of the Issei and Nisei, people always would rather not deal with things like this from their past.

And of course slavery is the worst of all. Slavery has been called America's original sin, and no matter how often we hear that the North tolerated it, that black people participated in the slave trade or that only a very small percentage of Southerners owned slaves, it doesn't really change anything.

It has been 150 years since the Civil War ended.

It's time to put away the toys and look to the future.