A Georgia contractor named Michael in Georgia arrived at the home of a black family with a Confederate flag on his truck. (Credit: Facebook)

A black family fired an independent contractor they had hired for a job after he drove to their home with a giant Confederate flag affixed to his truck.

Allison and Zeke Brown of Atlanta, Georgia hired the man, whose name is Michael, to replace the brakes on their golf cart. When he arrived at their home on Saturday, an enormous rebel flag was attached to his truck.

“Hi, you know what, I do apologize, I know you’ve come from a very long way, but we’re going to use someone else,” Allison, 40, a radiation therapist, tells Michael, as captured in a video on her Ring app.

“She’s upset with the flag,” explains Zeke, 48.

“No, I’m beyond upset with the flag,” corrects Allison.

Michael offers to remove the flag, but Allison says, “No, you don’t need to take it down. You can continue to believe what you need to believe, sir. But no, I cannot pay you for your services. Thank you, have a good day.”

Thousands watched the Ring footage and noted Allison’s decorum, much like Craig Brooks, a Holiday Inn Express employee in Austin, Texas, whose polite rejection, “It’s above me now,” to a customer who called him the n-word, went viral last month.

Would he had shown up to a white Jewish family with a swastika? The Confederate flag is a common white supremacist symbol of hatred of blacks. It represents racism, slavery and the country’s long history of oppression of black people — Brother Tyrone X (@tyrone345345) July 2, 2019

It takes a person of extraordinary stupidity to show up at a black person’s house with a CSA flag on their truck or person. — Ryan Quattro (@forzaquattro77) July 2, 2019

If he's a proud Southerner, why not an Alabama, South Carolina, etc flag? Funny how that works. — Blackbelt Birder 🏳️‍🌈 (@blackbeltbirder) July 2, 2019

She was brilliant!

I applaud her calm demeanor 👏👏



FACT:

No thoughtful human being should employ this guy... regardless of what race you are. Saving a few dollars isn’t worth losing your humanity. — Shopgirl 🇺🇸🗣☮️ (@idnac4u) July 2, 2019

GOOD FOR HER! And she was incredibly polite about it to boot. pic.twitter.com/pxPlTVx9hM — R. LaPointe (@lapointe67) July 2, 2019

We have a right to choose where we spend our dollars. And I completely agree with her refusal to work with that guy. — KimiBaeB (@kimiBaeB) July 2, 2019

Okay this lady was more polite then I would have been. Good on her, she's right. — Rachel Maria (@rachel_maria65) July 2, 2019

Initially unaware of Michael’s arrival, Allison was cleaning out her closet when Zeke walked into their bedroom and said, “God is testing me.”

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Allison tells Yahoo Lifestyle, “When my husband told me about the flag, I said, ‘Let me handle this,’” adding that their college-aged son fled the house, anticipating his mother’s reaction.

“I didn’t want to be the ‘angry black woman’ but I wanted him to learn and feel that bottom-line loss,” she says. “You don’t go to Germany and wave the Nazi flag. It’s the same thing.”

Zeke, a manager at a health care tech company, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that over the course of three days, he chatted with the man about work logistics over Facebook messenger. “He hadn’t been disrespectful prior, so seeing the flag did not fit my preconceptions,” he says. “The flag was absurd — I had to walk back into the house to calm myself down.”

After Michael left, he messaged Zeke saying, “I didn’t know the flag offended y’all.”

In screenshots of the conversation on Facebook Messenger shared with Yahoo Lifestyle, Zeke replied, “Yes, it is extremely offensive to anyone of color. I understand it is part of American history, but that flag stood for a time in history where people such as myself had a very bad way of life...Micheal, I hope this small interaction causes you to do a little research on how several Americans feel about the Confederacy. I know it’s part of history, so is Nazi Germany...”

Zeke tells Yahoo Lifestyle that he hoped the firing would be educational. “I thought, ‘Maybe there is hope for someone like him or an opportunity to save him from this way of thinking,” he says. “And I wanted that flag off my property — as one of the few black families in our subdivision, what would the neighbors think of a Confederate symbol in our driveway?”

Michael tells Yahoo Lifestyle that he is a “redneck” and that the flag is for the Fourth of July. “My little siblings bought it from a flea market,” he says. “I don’t support slavery and neither do my siblings. But I am not going to take it down when my siblings asked me to fly it. If [the family] wants to take offense, they can.”

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