While the south’s civil war banner has been lowered in state capitols, it has also been embraced by those worried about America’s changing ethnic makeup

Confederate flag is in retreat – but still gives voice to rebel yell of white anxiety

One year ago today a young man with a Glock pistol and a Confederacy fixation opened fire in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Dylann Roof killed nine people. Shortly afterward images emerged of him posing with the Confederate battle flag, and the flag – the “southern cross” – quickly became a locus for the nation’s outrage.

In the year since – a century and a half after the civil war ended – a battle has raged between much of the United States and the vestiges of the Confederacy, resulting in the removal of some high-profile public symbols. The loftiest may have been the battle flag that flew over the South Carolina state capitol, lowered for the last time in July.

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Alabama’s governor ordered it removed there, and there’s a push for similar action in Mississippi, the last state to feature the battle emblem in its official state flag. This past Tuesday the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination, called on its almost 16 million members to disavow the flag “as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African American brothers and sisters”.

Other skirmishes are still ongoing. In New Orleans city officials plan to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee from the lower garden district’s Lee Circle. But resistance has been strong – one potential contractor for the job found his Lamborghini sports car torched, and other bidders have been hesitant to step forward.

At the tallest building on Lee Circle, the Hotel Modern, attendant Carl Jones recently rode the elevator up a dozen stories to fix a room’s window blinds. Outside the window, Lee’s stone face looked back at him.

Jones, who is black, viewed it with the same attitude held by many other people in the city.

“I see it every day. Every day. But it’s not like I think about it all the time,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me. But what I don’t understand is this: Lee was on the losing side.

“Why are you going to put up a statue for the losing side?”

So there have been losses for the rebel south, and some stalemates. But more surprisingly the Confederacy has gained some ground. And not only in the south.

“Pro-Confederate flag rallies have been concentrated in the south, but not limited to the south,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate-group activity. He said there have been more than 300 flag rallies in the past year.

“We’ve seen them in Washington state, Oregon, Pennsylvania,” he said. “It’s not because the people in those places had ancestors die for the Confederacy. It’s a reflection of a general white anxiety, as the demographics of the country change.”

A few years ago the US Census Bureau released statistics showing that white Americans are dying faster than they are having babies, and last year it projected that within a generation white Americans will no longer make up a majority.

That shift feeds an ethnic anxiety, Cohen said, that underlies all current discussion of symbols and traditions. “At the extreme end you’ve got Dylann Roof,” he said. “At the other end you have, I must say, Donald Trump’s campaign.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A vendor flies the Confederate flag before a Donald Trump rally in Pittsburgh last week. Photograph: Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters

There’s no thought of the presidential candidate gunning down innocent people, he said. Not at all. But there is a broad and ill-defined unease that unifies his supporters. A sense of slipping power. A hope to, as the campaign slogan says, “make America great again”.

There was a time in the 20th century when the Confederate flag was not so tightly bound to racism and violence, according to Wayne Flynt, a historian at Auburn University.

“You could find the stars-and-bars on the Red Square in Moscow, or the Rastro in Madrid,” he said. “It’s because those people were rebelling against an autocratic government.”

Flynt said that’s because there are nuances about the battle flag that have been swallowed up with the passage of time. He said the closest historical comparison is the Scottish flag; its saltire literally inspired the Confederate version, but the inspiration runs deeper than that.

“People hold on to it, remembering the hopeless fight against a foe with superior numbers and technology, remembering Culloden,” he said. “They are clinging to a past that can never be again, and never quite was. It’s a mythological past.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bree Newsome climbs a flagpole to remove the Confederate battle flag at a Confederate monument in front of the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2015. Photograph: Bruce Smith/AP

Flynt is in his mid-70s, now, and said he remembers wearing an old Confederate hat during his days as a college student. It was a symbol of rebellion, not racism.

But the reality is, he said – the reality Confederate flag-bearers seem to not grasp – symbols shift.

“I would never wear that now,” he said. “The symbol has been appropriated. It now represents a hatred and division that I abhor.”

Cohen, the SPLC president, said the nation “has done a good job dealing with the symbol, but not so well with the underlying sentiment”. In the longer view, though, he said the removal of battle flags and glorifying monuments will make a difference.

Flynt, being a historian, prefers the longer view.

“You can wallow in the past so long that it becomes the future,” he said. “But take away the battle flag and you open the path for a return home and profound reconciliation and forgiveness.”