Civil (society) war: While the real guns have stopped firing, some Confederate apologists stand up for their meaning of the Confederate flag

Despite Dylann Roof’s racially-charged attack on South Carolina churchgoers last month, Mike Lawson doesn’t think the state should remove the Confederate flag from state grounds.

Lawson said the debate about the flag, which Roof was photographed wearing on his jacket, is unfounded. The flag, he said, doesn’t represent slavery or racism, and everyone who says it does is wrong.

“People are just so stupid, they’re bandwagon jumpers, you know? Americans are that way. I don’t know what’s wrong with them, but they jump on these bandwagons and they want to be part of some social movement like in the 60s … and if this is it, they’re going to latch onto it and say ‘I was a part of that,’” Lawson, who reenacted the Civil War’s Battle at Cumberland Church as a Confederate soldier on June 27, said.

The battle originally took place late in the war, on April 7, 1865, just two days before Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant.

Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum hosted the reenactment fromJune 26-28, a week before the Fourth of July — and 10 days after Roof’s attack.

In South Carolina, the scene of Roof’s massacre and hate crime on June 17 that took the lives of nine African American members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Confederate flag is nearly gone following public pushback after the attack.

On Monday afternoon, South Carolina’s Senate voted to remove the Confederate flag from state grounds, with an overwhelming 37-3 majority. The Senate’s vote marks the state’s first step toward removing the flag from public grounds. South Carolina’s House of Representatives still must pass the bill before it reaches Gov. Nikki Haley, who has said she will sign legislation to remove the flag.

Lawson and about 300 others gathered in Hartwood Acres — a park outside Pittsburgh — for a Civil War reenactment celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s end.

People who fly the Confederate flag today, Lawson said, shouldn’t be punished for the South’s antiquated use from its slave-owning past.

“You have this camera,” Lawson said to a group of spectators at the reenactment. “You don’t beat it, you don’t mistreat it, if it’s damaged you’ll get it repaired. Twenty years from now when they outlaw owning that camera, does that make you a bad person for ever owning one now?”

Lawson explained that during the Civil War, slaves were considered the same as inanimate objects, like his hypothetical camera.

“Back then, this camera and that person were the exact same thing. We now know this is totally wrong,” Lawson said. “How they ever came up with the idea of slavery in the first place is beyond me.”

During the reenactment on Saturday, Michael Kraus, a historian for Soldiers and Sailors and narrator for the event, said the flag should stay put on the field.

“I can see it as an interpretative tool. Beyond that, it’s a matter of freedom of speech,” Kraus said. “If it’s government, it’s time to bring it down. I don’t think we can erase it. We want to keep interpreting it. I want to keep seeing it in museums. The Civil War has long arms and we’re still in the reach of that.”

On some — like John Spaziani, who acted as Confederate General Samuel Cooper — those arms have a tight grasp. Spaziani arrived in full uniform and referred to himself as “General Cooper.”

As the General, he was steadfast in support of his troops, but when he took his hat off and broke character, he said he agreed with Haley’s stance to remove the flag from South Carolina state grounds.

“It is clear that the Confederate Flag does offend some people, and I can understand why it might,” Spaziani said. “[But] those of us who honor history look at it as a symbol of history.”

For Reggie Shuford, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania, an organization that works to defend the individual rights that the Constitution grants, the Confederate flag is a symbol of history, but one that should not be honored.

To Shuford, it is a reminder of an ugly chapter of America’s history.

“Removing the Confederate flag from government property, while not a solution to our nation’s racial issues, is certainly a step in the right direction of making this a more equal country,” Shuford said in an email Monday.  

Spaziani agreed that taking the flag down isn’t a cure-all for racism.

“All of a sudden now the debate is linked to, ‘If you only take the Confederate flag down, racism will disappear,’” Spaziani said. “I’m sorry, whatever the underlying causes are for racism, they’ll still be there whether a Confederate flag flies or not.”

In Gettysburg, the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the flag still flies — though only in some places.

In an email on Tuesday, Katie Lawhon, a spokesperson for Gettysburg National Military Park, said the park’s bookstore is no longer selling standalone items that “solely feature” the Confederate flag. This includes replicas of the flag, T-shirts and stickers. Other than removing those products, the park hasn’t made major changes.

“It all has to do with [historical] context,” Lawhon said. “The Confederate flag will always have a place at [the park].”

Kraus said the National Park Service had not set any limitations on displaying the Confederate flag at the reenactment.

For Chris Jones, who acted as a Confederate Lieutenant Colonel at the reenactment, taking the flag down is an attack on his family.

Having maternal ancestors who fought on both sides in the Civil War, Jones and his younger brother have been reenacting battles since he was young. Several years ago, he and his brother mirrored their ancestors and fought on opposing sides at a Gettysburg reenactment. For most of the battle, the two faced one another on the mock battlefield.

“I’d take a shot and he’d kinda duck, and he’d take a shot and I’d kinda duck … but it was just really eerie the first time I realized, ‘Oh s***, I’m shooting my little brother. My family did the same thing,” he said. “You hear about the brother on brother thing, my family was literally that.”

Instead of arguing his opinion on the Confederate flag, Jones said he will do all that he can to educate people on the flag’s history and what it means to him.

“I will educate, I will teach, I will tell [people] what it means to me, what it meant to my family who fought and died. They didn’t have shoes, much less slaves. It was not like that,” Jones said. “It may not be pleasant history, but it’s still our history.”