The Confederate flag has been a hot button topic in recent weeks since a white man killed nine black people during Bible study inside a South Carolina church.
Former HBCU head coach Billy Joe recently provided an account of an experience he had with an athlete and the Confederate flag.
“While we were in route to the campus police station, I asked the campus policeman, “what’s this all about.” He said your white freshman football kicker parked his motorcycle in front of the campus police station (for safekeeping) and the motorcycle has a CONFEDERATE FLAG on it,”Joe wrote on his Facebook page.
After discovering the flag, which he described as the size of a postage stamp, Joe said what the flag symbolized was far more important than its size.
“It still portrayed the same message to African Americans and other United States citizens: It implied racism, bigotry, prejudice, injustice, enslavement, hangings, rape, Jim Crow laws, segregation, treason and etc.,” he wrote.”
Joe said he didn’t believe his kicker was racist, however.
“After all, he was just a freshman and a nerdy 18-year-old white kid attending a black college in the South. He had adopted the black hip-hop genre: He had the black hair (tight curls/dreads), the language (ebonics), the mannerisms and black friends,” wrote Joe.
“(The flag) was similar to a person wearing a jacket with swastika emblems and nazi flags on it to a Jewish synagogue; it was similar to a black person attending a Ku Klux Klan cross burning rally with his white wife.”
Joe also chided who he called “Confederate flag lovers” about their reverence for the divisive symbol.
“Why did you allow racist people and hate groups to hijack your confederate flag, without so much as a whimper or a whisper from you, until now,” Joe said. “Removing the flag is just a gesture and a symbol. It will not solve any of the United States woes, or save lives. But it will bring the south into congruency with the rest of the country and the world.”
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