Call it by its true name: the Flag of White Supremacy

What news media and “Lost Cause” flag bearers call the “Confederate” flag is a mid-20th century creation based on the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.

The neo-Confederate flag bandied about today is the chosen symbol of segregationists, White supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as well as many Donald Trump devotees. Its mid-20th century design is based on a battle flag used by the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV), “an army raised to kill in defense of slavery.”

That’s not what I learned while growing up in southwest Georgia in the second half of the 20th century. The neo-Confederate flag was plastered across the back of pickup trucks punctuated with prominent rifle racks. It showed up at high school sporting events. It was one of the many myths related to the Lost Cause that I absorbed as “truth” and “good.”

Yes I knew that South Carolina led southern state secession from the Union in 1860. That was pridefully taught history. What I did not know: in the mid-1860s, decommissioned Confederate soldiers in Tennessee founded the KKK. That the KKK rose into prominence in the early 20th century as part of the “anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Black” movement.