Fred: more proof
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson, as quoted by the Civil War Trust, explains:
The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.
McPherson adds that the government refused to recognize the secession because they feared it would result in the U.S. turning into “several small, squabbling countries.”
It was not until long after the Civil War ended, however, that the battle flag began to take on even stronger connections to racial injustice.
In the late 1940s, the flag was adopted as a symbol of the Dixiecrats – a political party devoted to, among other things, maintaining segregation. They also opposed President Harry S. Truman?s proposals to instate anti-discrimination laws and make lynching a federal crime.
Some of the Dixiecrats went so far as to declare their commitment to ?white supremacy,? according to The Confederate Battle Flag: America?s Most Embattled Emblem by John M. Coski.
Coski writes that though the Dixiecrats soon faded into obscurity, their campaigns ?made the flag a fixture in places where it had been only a novelty before.? Coski gives the example of the University of Mississippi, which he notes rarely used the battle flag as a symbol prior to 1948. He says the university began heavily incorporating the symbol into school activities and events a few months after students protested against Truman?s civil rights proposals.
Notably, Ole Miss is the same institution that erupted into riots in 1962 when the federal government insisted that the school accept a black student.
In 1963, the year after the Ole Miss riot, Alabama Gov. George Wallace raised the flag over the state Capitol in protest against desegregation, as described by the Georgia State Senate Research Office in a 2000 report.
The same report found that the integration of the battle flag into the Georgia state flag in 1956 was ra