Confederate flag causes flap

Drive north on 17th Street, look left and up, and there it is. Kasey Montgomery hung a Confederate flag in his dorm room window at UNL to honor his Southern heritage but created controversy in the process. Despite complaints from students and university officials asking Montgomery to take it down the flag remains.

It's a three-by-five-foot cut of polyester made in Taiwan, bought in Virginia and displayed in a North Carolinan's University of Nebraska-Lincoln dorm room.

It's a piece of U.S. history linking our nation's only Civil War to George Wallace standing in a schoolhouse doorway to the bumper stickers and T-shirts you could buy last week at the Nebraska State Fair.

Today, nearly a century and a half after it was first flown by the Confederate Army during battle, it continues to entangle two UNL students and the university inside its red background, white trim and blue cross.

On one side of this particular Confederate flag stands Kasey Montgomery, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sophomore from a Carolina map dot who chooses to fly the flag.

On the other side stands Angel Jennings, a sophomore from the urban sprawl of northeast Virginia, who chooses to oppose it.

In the middle stand the rest of us, looking up and left, trying to decide whether the polyester means one thing, or the other thing, or nothing at all.

The flag's owner says it's about pride. He says this while looking at his tennis shoes.

Montgomery is a shy type, not the sort of student you'd expect to ignite controversy.

But that's exactly what he did - unintentionally, he says - when he forked over $20 for two Confederate flags at a Virginia gift shop this summer.

They came along when he returned from his hometown of King, N.C., for his sophomore year at UNL.

He hung one up on the bedroom wall of the new Husker Courtyards dorm room he shares with three other students, all Nebraskans. He hung the second flag in his bedroom window.

"I thought maybe some people wouldn't like it," the architecture student says. "Ididn't know anybody would get upset."

The town of about 7,000 people, and "about 97 percent white,"Montgomery says, are used to seeing it hanging in front of neighbors' houses.

The flag comes second - after the American flag, before the state flag - in the town's annual parade.

So the sophomore said he was surprised when a Husker Courtyards resident assistant approached him and asked him to take the flag out of his window mere days after he put it up.

A black student, Jennings, had gone to the university, upset about its presence.

Further meetings with various university officials followed, Montgomery says, meetings with one underlying theme: We'd like you to take the flag down, but we can't make you.

"They talked about how I'd be a great person for taking it down,"he says. "So does that make me a bad person for having it up in the first place?"

Chancellor Harvey Perlman and James Griesen, vice chancellor for student affairs, both say they don't like the message the flag sends to the university, the city or the state.

They also say Montgomery has the First Amendment right to display the flag in his window.

"Isuppose that, as a landlord, we could say there's to be no visible sign in any windows,"Griesen said. "Then we'd be in a situation where someone wouldn't be able to put up Christmas lights, or a Husker flag.

Montgomery's friends and roommates say he's got more than the First Amendment on his side.

They say the flag can have positive connotations, like rebelling against authority and pride in one's heritage.

They say Montgomery is the last person anyone would call racist if he didn't fly a Confederate flag in his window.

"Ithink he should keep it up,"says Montgomery's roommate Aaron Callaway, a North Platte sophomore. "I'd never thought twice about it before people started bringing it up. To me, and to a lot of us, it's just a flag.

To Montgomery, the flag means rolling hills and lush Carolina valleys. It means King, where he knows everyone and everyone knows him.

It's collard greens, grits with butter and a friendly wave from a front porch as you drive by, he says.

Angel Jennings is from the South, too, raised in the melting pot of Alexandria, Va.

Like Montgomery, she struggled for a time to adjust to the surroundings of Nebraska, a place so very far from home.

Unlike Montgomery, the Confederate flag signifies to her the worst part of the South she hails from, and the country in which she lives.

"- (I)t is a shameful reminder of slavery, segregation and hundreds of years of oppression,"she wrote in a Aug. 30 guest editorial in the Daily Nebraskan, UNL's student newspaper.

The journalism student sat at a computer writing that editorial for five or six hours, she says, breaking only to cry.

The final draft left out the part about the time the manager of a towing service sicked his pit bull on her, laughing while she screamed in fear.

It left out the the friendly Wal-Mart greeter who turned sullen when she walked in and the Village Inn waitress jovial with other customers but nasty to the black women in the corner booth. It omitted all the other times she wondered, or didn't have to wonder, if it was rudeness or racism.

How do you explain that to a predominately white campus in an predominately white state?

How do you explain how it all ties together and comes to be embodied by the red background, white trim, blue cross?

"Sometimes I just say, OK, maybe Ishould take a step back and it's not racism,"Jennings says, the words tumbling out of her. "But I feel it in Nebraska, more sometimes than I did in the South -

"Ijust decided I had to write this for me - I was just going to let it all out. I'm not going to fight every battle. The ones I fight, I'm going to try to win."

Jennings says she decided to fight the battle against the flag the day she looked up and left and saw it in a Husker Courtyards window.

She has history on her side, according to Patrick Jones, a UNLAfrican-American studies professor who specializes in the history of the Civil Rights movement.

Jones, a self-professed "white guy from the North," says the use of what was once a Confederate battle flag has always been tied to racism.

The "Southern Cross"rose to post-Civil War prominence around the turn of the 20th century, at the same time many Reconstruction-era reforms were being eroded by Southern state governments, he says.

It rose again during the 1960s, when those opposing the Civil Rights movement used it as a symbol of defiance against the federally mandated integration of schools.

The Strom Thurmond-led Dixiecrat party adopted it when it broke from the Democrats during the early stages of the Civil Rights struggle.

"As a historian, Ifind it difficult to untangle the symbol from racial inequality,"Jones says. "To say this flag isn't linked to slavery - That's a historically inaccurate statement if we're honest about it."

Jennings didn't have to consult a history book to believe the Confederate flag had something to do with racism.

She scheduled a meeting with Doug Zatechka, director of UNL's housing. Not satisfied with the result, she then met with Griesen, who assured her the student would be asked, but not told, to take the flag down.

The Daily Nebraskan ran an Aug. 30 story saying Montgomery decided to remove the flag from public view. Jennings then sent her fellow sophomore a note thanking him for taking the flag down.

Montgomery denies he ever agreed to take the flag down. He says he only promised to consider it before deciding he'd hide it when he was away at class, and display it when in his dorm room.

Jennings thinks Montgomery said one thing then did another, evidence that he's making a statement beyond Southern pride.

The sophomores have never talked about this. They've never met, instead linked only by the red, white and blue flag one flies and the other loathes.

This particular Confederate flag has a message easily readable from the inside of Montgomery's room.

The three words blur together, almost impossible to read as you whiz by in a car, glancing up and left.

The New York City Draft Riots of 1863

The enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 capped two years of increasing support for emancipation in New York City. Although Republicans attempted to keep abolitionists from taking a leading role in New York's antislavery politics during the early years of the war, by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York's white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York's Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. To these New Yorkers, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears. In March 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.

In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.

The rioters' targets initially included only military and governmental buildings, symbols of the unfairness of the draft. Mobs attacked only those individuals who interfered with their actions. But by afternoon of the first day, some of the rioters had turned to attacks on black people, and on things symbolic of black political, economic, and social power. Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. By the spring of 1863, the managers had built a home large enough to house over two hundred children. Financially stable and well-stocked with food, clothing, and other provisions, the four-story orphanage at its location on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street was an imposing symbol of white charity toward blacks and black upward mobility. At 4 P.M. on July 13, "the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution." The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. John Decker, chief engineer of the fire department, was on hand, but firefighters were unable to save the building. The destruction took twenty minutes

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