Charleston, South Carolina: I stood clutching a copy of Southern Partisan, a magazine dedicated to Southern pride (articles included the “Real story of Abraham Lincoln” and comparisons of Al Gore to rich Union families who paid to keep their sons out of the Civil War). In front of me, a man with a long white beard was paying for a Confederate flag and a bumper stick that said “I smile when you call me a Rebel.”
“I won’t tell you I know who did it,” the store clerk said to the patron with a smirk, “But a kid over in Charleston has been taking matters into his own hands. He’s went to every single stop sign in his neighborhood and pasted one of those paper-stickers of the [Confederate] flag in the bottom corner. The police couldn’t get it off, so they had to replace every sign.”
“The paper ones won’t come off, but they’ll fade eventually,” the bearded man said.
“Ah, but you know what,” the clerk said. “He says he’s going to keep doing it, and when they fade he’ll do it again. He wrote a note that said, ‘Honor Confederate Army month, or it’s not going to stop.’”
The two men shared a laugh, and the man paid for his paraphernalia and left. I got to talking with the clerk–who introduced himself to us as Tim Manning, author of 35 books about the South, founder of the Virginia Heritage Foundation and the North Carolina Heritage Foundation, and pro-life, pro-secessionist lecturer– about whether this type of Southern pride was typical in the area’s youth.
“First of all,” he said, “there are 15,000 organizations, and I’m not talking chapters, I’m talking organizations, dedicated to Southern secession. And plenty of those deal with young people. The most prominent ones that deal with a lot of young people have to be the Abbeville Institute and the League of the South. I sent my son to the Abbeville Institute for seven years, and it did the job. It really instilled him with the knowledge and the pride necessary to work toward our independence.”
It turned out it really had done the job, for when I went to pay for the magazine he said, “Actually, my was the editor for that issue. Make sure you check out the picture of him standing on Ted Kennedy’s lawn with a Confederate flag.”
