He didn’t do it because he hated black people, he did it because of his pride, it’s how he was raised.”

Never in my life have I felt like I was being attacked mentally because of the color of my skin. I’ve never been uncomfortable or paranoid around people who were not of a minority race until now.

Last week at school, someone painted the Confederate flag on the school rock. Oddly, many people such as myself didn’t find out until the next day and were verbally attacked when we questioned the issue and the motives of the artist. How could someone misconstrue the meaning of something so powerful as the Confederate flag with pride?

In 1861, a main issue of the Civil War was that the North and theSouth couldn’t agree on whether the slaves would be freed or not. Obviously, the North won the war and Abraham Lincoln, leader of the Union, freed the slaves. This made Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate states, and the Confederate states mad because they had no more workers for their fields, housekeepers for their homes, or servants for their families. Hence the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederate flag, both of which were used as symbols of hate and were intended to harm the minds, spirits, and morality of the freed slaves and white supporters. Although Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves on December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment ratification made enslaved slaves free. Slave owners did not tell the slaves that they were freed until months later.

Pride? Where is the pride in this? How could anyone think that hurting another person is an expression of pride? I thought it was pretty clear that the reasoning for the flag and the Klan was because the South was extremely angered by the freeing of the slaves, not because they were happy. If they were, they certainly wouldn’t be going on a killing spree solely for the purpose of and expression of pride.

People have died and been attacked by dogs, water hoses, and law enforcement so people of my color, black people, could be free. Civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his wife Coretta Scott King, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and many more have fought to their deaths for the freedom and equality of brotherhood for everyone, not just blacks. The fact that parents are teaching their children how to embrace racism and how to take pride in physically, mentally, and emotionally hurting people just because of their race is absurd. But that’s not the thing that haunts my mind the most.

The thing that haunts my mind the most is that American youth are truly ignorant to this country’s history. Years and years of struggling and you mean to tell me that nobody knows a thing about history, yet are quick to defend something they have no clue about? Someone has the audacity to categorize the Confederate flag with something so beautiful as the feeling of pride?

Pride is something that should come from within. It should be a way to express how one feels about a situation in a positive way. Pride should not be misconstrued with hate, anger, or revenge, especially when inflicting pain on another living thing. People need to stop making excuses for ignorance in America and do something about it because if we as a people forget the history that brought us this far, it will repeat itself.











Editor’s Note: Danage wrote this letter the day after the school was vandalized during her journalism class.