“An Insult to the American People as a Whole”: Confederate Emblems, the Lost Cause, and African American Criticism of American Democracy

During the early 1950s, the United States experienced a surge in popularity of Confederate symbols, often euphemistically referred to as a “flag fad” in white mainstream media outlets. This flag fad preceded the beginning of the “classic” Civil Rights Era from 1955 to 1965. By the time Brown vs. Board was decided in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus boycotts began in 1955, the Confederate flag had become a potent symbol of white backlash against African American rights. Yet, while brazenly flying the Confederate flag at protests at integrated schools, white citizen council meetings, and political rallies, white segregationists in the South distanced themselves from global white supremacy, specifically Nazism. This paper will discuss how African American activists argued that global white supremacy included white supremacists within the United States by highlighting the clear overlap in the symbolism and rhetoric of U.S. white supremacy and that of the Nazis. African American organizations like the Civil Rights Congress protested the Confederate flag by comparing its appeal and meaning to symbols of the Nazi regime like the swastika. While battling against accusations that they were “un-American,” due to their Communist Party ties, the CRC argued that the flag’s national popularity was dangerous and a sign of fascism within the United States’ own borders. Black antiracist and antifascist organizers joined the ideological battles of the Cold War to the long work of African American countermemory of the Civil War. For these activists, battles over the symbolism of the Civil War had deeper meaning for larger efforts to critique the hypocrisy embedded in American democracy. The fight against global white supremacy in the post-WII era was directly related to African Americans’ long struggle over the legacy of the Civil War.