Re: rebel flag flap in Dixie

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hunter Gray wrote:

> I've always liked the old symbol of the Southern Student Organizing
> Committee [SSOC] -- a sensibly militant and effective civil rights
> organization which formed in '64.  Working very closely with the Student
> Non-violent Coordinating Committee, SSOC was made up primarily of very brave
> young Southern whites who risked much -- including family ties -- by
> fighting for social justice on many critical fronts.
>
> Its symbol was an interracial handshake -- across the backdrop of a
> Confederate flag.
My friend Nelson Blackstock was a leader of the SSOC before he hooked up
with the Trotskyist movement. He wrote an article for the Young
Socialist magazine in 1969 that took aim at a tendency in the Southern
New Left to in effect mimic black nationalism but from the point of view
of the poor white. From this perspective, southern white resentment
toward the Yankee was seen as progressive. This was a short-lived
phenomenon as most southern white radical youth, including Nelson in a
brief sojourn on his way to Trotskyism, hooked up with the SDS which
attacked "white skin privilege" with a vengeance.

Of course, what was absent in both the SSOC and the SDS was any kind of
deep class analysis. From discussions I've had with Nelson over these
matters ranging over the decades, he has made one point very clear. Once
he became a Marxist, he was anxious to shed all residual romanticism
about the south. His father was a fairly typical white southerner from
the rural area near Atlanta, who hunted every chance he got and had a
mixture of racialist and populist attitudes typical of the earlier
generation of Tom Watson populists. When Nelson was young, he was
fascinated by Confederate symbols and drew pictures of the rebel flag in
his notebooks at school. After reading Harry Golden in the local Atlanta
paper in the early 1960s, however, he came to the conclusion that racism
was evil and that any token of the racist past was to be shunned.

At the U. of Georgia, he hung out with other southern youth who were
pro-integration and moving leftward politically. For them, the biggest
attraction was not grits and hunting but the rather exotic North with
its beat poets, Jews, communists and Jazz. Although Nelson still has a
strong affection for many things southern, especially the music, he went
through a paradigm shift that many young people of his generation went
through.

I am cc'ing him on this in the hope that he can send me the YS article
in question, which I will forward to the list.


--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org




~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.