Editor: My wife and I followed with great interest the story about South Carolina permanently taking down the Confederate flag from outside the State House.
You see, in the early days of integration —1968 — we moved to the south, Chattanooga Tenn., to work.
We really were naive Canadians (we thought a sign that read “White Only” in a laundromat meant white clothes only).
This was early days in the time of busing black students to white schools to force integration.
Brainerd is a middle-class — at the time exclusively white — neighbourhood of Chattanooga. The newly-integrated — bused in — black students at Brainerd High School objected to the school fight song, “Dixie,” and school’s symbol, the Confederate flag.
The school board therefore voted to ban both of these. On the Friday night after the vote, my wife and I drove to Brainerd to see if anything was going on. Sure enough, the streets were full of cars full of white students driving around singing “Dixie” at the top of their lungs and waving Confederate flags out of the cars.
We also decided to go to a football game at Brainerd the following day.
Brainerd was playing a team from long-integrated Notre Dame Catholic High School.
At half time, the Brainerd students — predictably — burst into a chorus of “Dixie.”
We will never forget what happened next. All the Notre Dame students filed down onto the field, stood in front of the Brainerd students, looked up at them and sang “America the Beautiful.”
Now — 47 years later — South Carolina has finally removed the flag. We are left wondering why it took them so long.
Barry Whaites
Langley