S.C.’s Flag Controversy Stirs Up Painful Moments

PENDLETON, S.C. —  Nobody’s in any hurry to get anywhere this rainy morning inside Buddy’s Automotive on Mechanic Street. Cecil Padgett is dropping peanuts in his bottle of Coke and talking to his old friend, Robert Thompson. Robert, 73, is black. Cecil, 68, is white. That’s not supposed to matter, not anymore anyway, except this is the cradle of the Confederacy, so it still does.

“They can leave it up or they can take it down. Don’t make no difference to me,” Cecil grunts. Robert smiles and looks at his shoes.

The subject, of course, is the Confederate battle flag fluttering atop the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia 120 miles away, a 4-by-6-foot swatch of red and blue cotton that is at once a source of pride and disgrace for a state struggling to move beyond its racist past.

For more than 30 years South Carolinians have been squabbling over whether to leave that flag up or take it down. But now, with an unexpectedly crucial Republican presidential primary concluding here Saturday, their conflict has gone painfully public. The worldwide media have arrived at one of this prideful state’s rawest moments, like a nosy mother-in-law showing up for dinner in the middle of a marital fray.

The enduring controversy has come to define South Carolina in what should be its moment of glory, a once-laggard state that is now leading the region in economic growth, attracting such international giants as BMW and Honda and breaking records for capital investments.

Instead, South Carolina recently made its debut on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” with the question: Which statehouse still flies the Confederate battle flag? Andy Rooney took the state to task on “60 Minutes.” And just as reporters were pulling into Columbia for the GOP presidential debate Tuesday, the top story in South Carolina’s leading newspaper was the governor’s latest attempt to end a two-month NAACP boycott that has cost $7 million in lost convention business so far.

Even Garage Shows Duality of State

Few things can tear back the scab on Southern wounds like the mention of the battle flag. South Carolina is a state that has come a long way since the Civil War’s first shots were fired here at Ft. Sumter. But it enters the 21st century with one foot in the present and one in the past, a duality that is evident everywhere. Even in Buddy Durham’s corner garage.

Buddy’s blue Chevy Caprice barrels up the driveway, back from lunch. He walks into an office full of car parts and a haphazard collection of chairs where his friends, Cecil and Robert, are chewing the fat.

At a glance, one would never guess that 63-year-old Buddy used to be the mayor of this one-stoplight town in the northwest corner of the Upcountry. Once ringed by cotton plantations--Robert’s great grandfather was a slave on one of them--Pendleton is now an eclectic mix of artists, academics and people like these men, all of whom were born here.

Buddy’s brown cap sits high on his head, his face is ruddy, his belly considerable, his drawl thick. He still uses the word “coloreds” in conversation, but Robert doesn’t mind, because in some ways, Buddy is one of the bravest men he will ever know. And the feeling is mutual.

Pendleton wasn’t always so friendly to black men like Robert, who went to a town council meeting in the 1950s to complain about trash being dumped in a ditch near the cabin where the black Boy Scouts met.

The mayor at the time adjourned the meeting rather than let him inside, saying the dog sitting at his feet had more right to be there. Only one council member stayed to listen after everybody else had marched off. That was Buddy.

More than 25 years later, the two men would serve side-by-side on the same council, Robert as its first black member, Buddy as the mayor.

It worked out all right in the end. But, as with most things concerning race in this part of the country, it took considerable pain to get there.

Both Want Flag to Come Down

That’s why both men want the Rebel flag to come down. Fly it on front porches or put it in a museum, they say, but it doesn’t belong over the state Capitol that is supposed to represent all South Carolinians.

“To me, it symbolizes hatred and segregation,” Robert says in a voice that lost its anger a long time ago. “Every time you see a picture of a hate group you see that flag. And I don’t see the people who say the flag represents their Southern heritage making any effort to take it back.”

“The rednecks is what ruined it,” Buddy concurs, resentful of contemporary fringe groups that in his view have sullied the flag’s storied history, a complaint white Southerners often express. “They used the flag for something it wasn’t supposed to be.”

The flag was hoisted in 1962 to commemorate the Civil War centennial, but state lawmakers failed to specify when it should come down. That was in the heat of the civil rights movement, and many saw its display as an act of defiance toward a federal government forcing an end to the segregated South.

Supporters say it is not a symbol of slavery but of loyalty to a shared heritage only they can truly understand.

Even after its assimilation into the global economy, its capitulation to civil rights and the mainstreaming of native inventions like country music and barbecue, the South remains a place apart, its most burning issues often a puzzle to the rest of the country.

“It’s like an insane asylum, and trying to understand the inmates if you’re not one of them,” says Southern historian and author Shelby Foote, who contends the historical meaning of the flag is widely misunderstood. “We take pride in some things we should be ashamed of and are ashamed of some things we should take pride in. It takes a long time to get to know us.”

Recent polls show a majority of South Carolinians want the flag to come down, though many appear less offended by the banner’s symbolism than by the negative attention it has brought to a region that no longer cares to be seen as bigoted and backward.

“To people from other places, this controversy makes us look hidebound. A lot of local people today are embarrassed about it,” says Neal Thigpen, political science professor at Francis Marion University in Florence.

For all of its recent economic successes, South Carolina is still recovering from decades of illiteracy and poverty. The state ranks 49th in education, with its teacher salaries among the lowest in the country. It continues to struggle with high rates of infant mortality, teenage pregnancy and violent crime.

Bickering over a Rebel flag not only dredges the state’s darkest past but keeps South Carolina from solving its most pressing problems, critics say. Law enforcement officers, at the Capitol this week to lobby for stricter drunken driving laws, said they were hard-pressed to make their case to a Legislature all wrapped up in what to do with the flag.

But putting the issue to rest has proved impossible, despite periodic protestations from around the country. This was, after all, the first state to secede from the Union, a fierce rogue that took its cues from no one then and is loath to bend to a boycott led by outsiders now.

“For years, the South felt victimized. It was defending a system of segregation the rest of the country didn’t like. That created a sense of apartness,” says Hastings Wyman, publisher of the Southern Political Report.

But even as newcomers transform the state, many South Carolinians remain unwilling to banish every part of the heritage that makes them distinct--the chivalry and broadsword values that walked oddly hand-in-hand with lynchings and church burnings. “They don’t want the bigotry of the past, but they want the graciousness of it,” Wyman says.

Wishing the Furor Would Just Go Away

Cecil is suffering from “flag fatigue,” the condition visited upon people sick and tired of talking about, thinking about or being asked about the furor. He, like a lot of South Carolinians, wishes the whole mess would just go away.

“Everybody argues back and forth about that darn flag. It just drives people apart. If they would just all go home, we’d be a lot better off,” he says, taking a last swig of his Coke. The peanuts are all gone so he drops his cigarette butt into what’s left.

South Carolina isn’t perfect, but it’s better, he says. There isn’t a place in Pendleton, population 3,700, that won’t welcome his friend Robert, or any other person of color for that matter.

The changes came large and small. When Robert reported for work in 1953 at the Owens Corning plant with a degree in industrial science and a pencil in his pocket, state law said he couldn’t hold a job higher than laborer; his boss told him to get rid of the pencil. Thirty-three years later, Robert retired as a department head with two gold watches and a pension.

The day Buddy found out some stores wouldn’t sell Coke to black people--”a white man’s drink”--he went straight out and bought a stack of cases. He’s been selling them ever since, 3 cents below cost. “I think everybody ought to be able to drink it,” he says.

Robert’s daughter was one of the first black students to attend Pendleton High. She got arrested at a demonstration when some kids in the band decided they didn’t want to march with the Confederate flag or play “Dixie” anymore. That’s when Robert decided it was time to run for the council.

“Every town got its problems and every town got its advantages,” he says. “I decided I’d stay here and help change this one.”

In their quiet way, these men had helped soften one small Southern place, bridging their own racial divides and transcending cultural traditions of hate. It is a story that has been repeated in unremarkable towns all over the state--all over the South--an achievement lost in the din of public scuffling over where or whether the flag should fly.

“You see people with Confederate flags stuck up on their trucks and on their car tags. We got rednecks and we got the NAACP marching down the street,” Cecil says. “But I’ll tell you this, there ain’t no two better friends in the country than Robert and me. I’d help him any way he’d help me. Ain’t that right, Robert?”

“Oh, yes.”