By Bill Marshall
Bill Marshall is an attorney in Birmingham.
When I was twelve years old, some grown men thought it would be a good idea to put a bomb in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. My entire family was shocked and saddened by this despicable crime--but not like the families and friends of the four girls who died. And not like the black community that suffered violation in its literal sanctuary. My family sat around the breakfast table in our comfortable Mountain Brook home, shook our heads in collective disbelief, and talked about how terrible it was. I'm sure I ran outside later to play with my friends in the neighborhood, just like on any other afternoon. I probably even put on the gray Confederate officer's hat I loved so much and waved my plastic saber at imaginary Yankees in the yard.
On the day Rev. King's mother was assassinated as she played organ in her church in Atlanta, my uncle John Marshall got his rifle and drove from his house in Marion, Alabama, out to Obie Scott's farm in Perry County. Coretta Scott King's mother, Bernice, had worked for my grandmother, and Uncle John was a friend of the family. Fearing some coordinated attack on the Kings, Uncle John was ready for action. He had been there before as an infantry officer in the Battle of the Bulge. Twice wounded. Bronze Star. Silver Star.
I am proud of what Uncle John did that day in 1974, just as I am proud of his war service in 1944, just as I am proud of my Great Uncle John Lee Marshall's service, in 1864, as a Captain of Company F of the Alabama Regiment. Uncle John Lee left the University of Alabama in 1862 to enlist and fought at Chickamauga and Atlanta before being captured. I am proud of his courage and his will to survive the long months of captivity at the Michigan POW camp where he was lucky to eat a rat once in a while. Uncle John Lee was my Granddaddy Marshall's oldest brother. They were far enough apart in years for Uncle John Lee to be away at war when my grandfather was born at Perdue Hill, near Camden, Alabama. (I am also proud of the fact that the Yankees went to the trouble of burning my grandfather's house as they passed through.) My late father, born in 1911, used to take Uncle John Lee to Confederate veteran reunions and help the frail old man onto the dais. I've seen the photos of the wizened men with their long white beards and uniforms that had come to fit them once again as their frames aged and shrank.
Uncle John Lee's service allowed me to join the Sons of Confederate Veterans in high school. I was also able to list Burette Osborne Holman, a relative on my mother's side, who died in 1864 and whose name graces one of the bronze plaques on the Rotunda commemorating the University of Virginia students and alumni who died during that war. I was proud of those men then; I was proud of them every time I stopped to read the plaque as a graduate student at UVA in the 1980's; and again as a law student in the 1990's. I'm still proud of them today. They gave their lives for their country. Had I lived in those times, I'm sure I would have fought alongside, with my gray officer's hat and waving saber.
Southerners are nothing if not romantic, and I've been as romantic as we come. Victory may be sweet, but it lacks the lingering aftertaste of going down in glory fighting for a lost cause. That aftertaste gets into the DNA and won't come out for generations--if ever. I know that slavery was wrong, and I am ashamed to say that my family once owned slaves. I remember seeing a copy of an ancestor's will in which human beings with actual names are bequeathed like cattle and land. It made me proud that my ancestor had been so prosperous. Then I was ashamed that I was proud. The antebellum mansion in the family photo on my wall today was probably--no, undoubtedly--built by slaves. The entire Southern economic and social structures were dependent upon slave labor, and our economy helped fuel other economies, in other regions, that indirectly prospered on the backs of slaves at the same time they were decrying the evils of the South. I'm proud we stood up to those hypocrites and fought for what we believed. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees, right? What is more romantic than that?
And we are in the fine company of Egypt, Greece, Rome, all grand civilizations built with slave labor. Indeed, most of the man-made wonders and glorious cities of this world were built under the whip hand of slave owners or feudal lords, or kings, or emperors. We travel around the word to see those things. We cherish and protect the pyramids and parthenons. We don't tear them down.
That brings me to the Confederate flag. Since all things Southern are related, it should be no surprise that the original Confederate flag, the "Stars and Bars," was designed in Marion, Alabama, by Nicola Marschall (who may or may not be another relative). No one thinks much about this flag, as it is the Confederate Battle Flag that has been the popular, familiar, visible, ubiquitous, famous, and infamous symbol of whatever we are destined to invest in it. Indeed, I wonder if anyone would even recognize the original Stars and Bars that was raised over the Confederate capital in Montgomery in 1861, and I doubt its presence would inflame the passions on all sides as the Battle Flag has done and continues to do.
If we want to honor the Battle Flag under which our ancestors fought and died, the emblem of our tragically fated and doomed land and way of life, maybe we should have taken better care of it. Maybe we--and by "we" I mean good, honorable men of no color who have been in charge of this country since its founding and who have only in recent times yielded some power to women of no color and even more recently and reluctantly to people of color--maybe we should never have let our beloved flag be co-opted by hate groups and radicals like the Klan or any number of white supremacist thugs who have used the flag as a symbol of hatred and evil and who have committed murder and other despicable crimes under its banner. Maybe if we had snatched it back the first time they wrapped themselves in it and guarded it from grime as we would the honor of our womenfolk, throwing the scoundrels in jail along the way--well, maybe things would be different now.
But they're not. Let's face it, whatever the flag symbolizes today, it is a fait accompli. We can't change it, and we will never agree on it. However, I have come to recognize one harsh and inalterable truth: the Confederate flag was the flag of a repressive regime that enslaved black people. I don't see any way around that fact. We can argue until we're blue (and gray) in the face about the causes of the war and states' rights and the role of slavery in the South. Those are complex and multifaceted subjects, but the fact of slavery in the South is indisputable. That fact, and the long, shameful history of Jim Crow segregation that followed, requires that we retire the Confederate flag to its rightful place under protective glass in a museum. Maybe then we relegate arguments over the meaning of this historical symbol to their appropriate level of importance and start focusing on the more relevant, living issues that directly affect American lives in 2015. Like how and why someone can think it's a good idea to bring violence and death into a sanctuary. Maybe we can get at the roots of our indigenous terrorism once we clear away the foliage.
Legend has it that Uncle John Lee wore his old uniform every day until his death in 1924. Legend also has it that at the ripe old age of eighty-two Uncle John Lee finally met his Maker when a chifforobe toppled over on him as he tried to reach the whiskey bottle he kept on top. I'm proud of his tenacity. I laugh when I think of the whiskey and the chifforobe doing what the whole damn Yankee army could not. I can imagine Uncle John Lee's spindly, gray-clad arms coming out from the sides of the overturned chest, still clutching the whiskey and not spilling a drop. I can laugh at that image, in irony and maybe defiant pride, but it's still a lost cause.
Bill Marshall was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.
In addition to practicing law, he still plays guitar in the Locust Fork Band and often waxes nostalgic for the good old days in Tuscaloosa, at a bar called Lee's Tomb.