"Burn A Rebel Flag, Get A Free Chocolate" My Hometown Chocolatier Stirs Controversy

"Burn A Rebel Flag, Get A Free Chocolate"

Hillsborough Shop Owner Denounces Confederate Symbols

https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/orange-county-news/burn-a-rebel-flag-get-a-free-chocolate-local-chocolate-shop-owner-denounces-confederate-symbols-near-store/

Hillsborough Shop Owner Gets Death Threats Over Sign Promising Free Chocolate For Burning Confederate Flags
https://abc11.com/society/burn-a-rebel-flag-get-free-chocolate-hillsborough-shop-sign-says/5450372/

"To My Southern Pride Friends and Neighbors: Why I Hate the Stars and Bars"

(... written by a Hillsboroughan who chooses anonymity for fear of reprisals upon his downtown home.)

As a child growing up in the Great White North, I was the one who wanted the gray kepi with the stars and bars glued to its top. I reveled in the stories of Jubal Early and Jackson’s lankey striders. And I more or less continued this reverie until the civil rights movement, Bull Conner’s dogs, and a governor standing in a school doorway  axe handle in hand made me reconsider but it didn’t make me hate the stars and bars; experience and study did that.

As a young man I was a merchant seaman, and one summer I worked my way to Europe and back. I hitch-hiked around Western Europe for some weeks and then signed on to an American vessel to get a ride home. That ship took me into Poland and gave me a chance to see East Germany, and what I saw simultaneously disgusted me and made me proud to be an American where our government didn’t do to people what the Eastern Bloc countries did. But, as my ship approached New Orleans a pilot boat met us and on the mast of the pilot boat the stars and bars flew above Old Glory. That made me so mad I actually spit on the pilot boat.

Later, while studying military history  (BA, MA, ABD) I had occasion to study military disasters and came across the slaughter at Fort Pillow. That particular crime against humanity was perpetrated by N.B Forrest ‘s troops in the last days of our Civil War. The fort was defended by about 600 Union troops and Forrest commanded upwards of 2500 troops. Half of the troops in Fort Pillow were Black and the ones who surrendered were summarily executed, as were some White Tennessee volunteers fighting alongside them, all under the stars and bars.

After the war, Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of  the KKK. The KKK was and remains by any measure a terrorist organization created to intimidate the rural south’s majority Black population. The KKK too operated under the stars and bars. Within three years, disheartened by the brutal mob he could not rule, Forrest ordered the klan to disband. But like that one little bobber that just won’t be flushed, the klan rose again.

When I signed off my ship at Mobile in 1964 I stuck out my thumb and headed for home. A car bearing the stars and bars proudly on its rear window and a cargo of peckerwoods picked me up and dropped me off in the middle of a blackwater swamp. They said they were going to buy a jug and if I hadn't gotten a ride by the time they’d returned they would certainly pick me up. This was the only time I ever flagged down a Greyhound, counted out my hard earned into the driver’s hand and go out of stars and bars country.

In 1978 I moved to North Carolina to continue my studies in military history and a year later the klan perpetrated the “Greensboro Massacre” once again under the stars and bars.

This is why I just about puke every time I see that flag. And my disgust is probably trivial compared to the feelings of Black and colored folks who lived through a hundred years of Jim Crow.  So, please, Southern Pride folks, in the interest of civility, celebrate your heritage in private because the chosen symbol of that heritage nauseates folks who have been terrorized by it.