Confederate Flag Demonstrations: A Haven For White Supremacists
In the two weeks since Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse, demonstrations in support of the racist symbol have swept across the South.
More than 70 different events have taken place since, under the banner of the well-worn talking point: it’s about heritage, not hate.
Chief among those holding to the fantasy of a Confederate Battle Flag absent its racist heritage are members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), an organization that has long shielded itself from criticism by arguing its support of Confederate history is fueled by an abiding respect for heritage.
But that distinction has become less clear as attacks on the Confederate battle flag have grown, and organizations like the SCV have found allies in the hate-filled corners of neo-Confederacy. Despite the SCV’s denouncement of white supremacists and racists, leaders from known hate groups have been welcomed to events and been given the chance to speak and recruit.
On the Saturday following Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s order to remove the Confederate Battle Flag from the Confederate memorial on the Capitol grounds, two members of the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), Mike Williams, who serves as the group’s adjutant, and Andy Bodenheimer held an “Alabama Heritage Rally” and shared the speakers’ podium with leadership from the League of the South (LOS), a neo-Confederate hate group.
The “Battle Flag makes no distinction about race; creed or religious affiliation.”
“We are pushing now to reach out and grab the hearts and minds of fellow southerners to pull them in to believing that the politicians have betrayed them because it is true,” William Flowers, Vice Chairman of the Georgia LOS, proclaimed during a speech that amounted to a recruiting pitch. “They do not represent your interests. They have stabbed you in the back. They will never stand up for you and they will never fight.”
The irony is that the SCV has long tried, and failed, to distance itself from the neo-Confederate movement. Bodenheimer, is a member of both the SCV and LOS, and LOS symbols and messaging, for example, and people like him are not a rare at SCV events.
The irony for the SCV, which claims that the “Battle Flag makes no distinction about race; creed or religious affiliation,” is that it appears to make no distinction, in the absence of a public relations crisis, between those who wish to violently overthrow the U.S. government in order to establish a white ethnostate and those who lack empathy enough to understand the battle flag as a racist symbol of systemic oppression.
While the SCV said little about sharing the stage with members of the LOS, a group with its own paramilitary wing whose president Dr. Michael Hill has claimed that “white people in the South” are “preserving a kith and kin, blood and soil nation” established by white Europeans, they were quick to dismiss the appearance of other hate groups.
Charles Kelly Barrow, the SCV commander in chief, issued a news release after North Carolina Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was granted a permit for a rally on the Statehouse grounds.
“The Sons of Confederate Veterans has a strictly enforced ‘hate’ policy. Anyone with ties to any racist organization or hate group is denied membership. Any member developing ties to these organizations will be immediately expelled. Prohibited organizations include the KKK, American Nazi Party, the National Alliance, or any organization expressing racist ideals or violent overthrow of the United States government.”
But, as the Anti-Defamation League points out, Barrow is just one of many SCV members with ties to hate groups. Kirk Lyons, a white supremacist lawyer who long served as the “chief trial counsel” for the Southern Legal Resource Center, has been a major figure in the SCV for years. Lyons was was married on the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations compound by the group’s late leader and Christian Identity preacher, Richard Butler,
The Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which inspired accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, has connections to the SCV, too. In January 2014, the CCC’s late founder Gordon Lee Baum and two other CCC members, all of whom were SCV members, received “SCV War Veteran Medals” from the SCV’s Missouri chapter. The ADL notes at least four other instances of SCV and CCC collaboration in the past five years.
Larry Darby, who has served as the CCC’s chairman for the Alabama Capital Region and regularly posts articles from the LOS website, also was in attendance at the “Alabama Heritage Rally” on the capitol grounds as well. Darby, who identified his presence in a video on his Facebook profile, is also, coincidentally, a member of the SCV Facebook group.
If the SCV and its constituents are serious about their “hate policy” — and mean what they say about heritage superseding hate — the makeup of their events makes that a hard to swallow proposition. Strange times make for strange bedfellows, indeed.
