One Man’s Reply
 
From: cliftonpalmermclendon@yahoo.com
 
LETTER: Why does a racist symbol fly over our courthouse?
http://www.waltonsun.com/news/confederate-9118-symbol-flag.html
 
RACISM: The assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another which is usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others.[definition taken from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.; 1981)]
 
Anyone who seeks a racist flag needs to look no farther than the thirteen-stripe United States flag. Under that flag, many thousands of Africans were transported to slavery in the New World.
 
No Confederate-flagged ship ever made a slaving-run.
 
Under that flag, Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling all Jews from parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky.
 
The Confederate States of America never practiced anti-Semitism. To the contrary — the Confederate forces included Jewish officers and enlisted men, and from the beginning, the Confederate cabinet included Judah Philip Benjamin, a Jew. (The first Jewish US cabinet member, Oscar Straus, served under Theodore Roosevelt.)
 
Under that flag, the military services were segregated until after World War II.
 
Confederate military units saw many different ethnicities – including thousands of blacks – serving cheek-by-jowl and receiving the same pay and allowances.
 

Under that flag, Native Americans/Indians were cheated, forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, and massacred wholesale.
 
Native Americans/Indians received no such treatment at Confederate hands. To the contrary — Native Americans/Indians played a vital role in the Confederate Army. General Stand Watie, a Cherokee, was the last Confederate general to sign a cease-fire with the US Army.
 
Under that flag, American citizens in the 1940s were forcibly removed from their homes and herded into concentration camps solely because their ancestors had been born in Japan.
 
The Confederate States of America never put anyone into a concentration camp based on his parents’ ethnicity.
 
That flag is the favored flag of the Ku Kluxers. See http://pointsouth.com/csanet/kkk.htm for pictures.
 
So – if you seek a racist flag, go for Old Glory.
 
Clifton Palmer McLendon
Upshur County, Texas