Nixing Dixie

By MICHAEL RILEY/ATLANTA

The United Daughters of the Confederacy had had their way with the Senate in the past. Four times this century the Senate had renewed the patent on their insignia, which includes the seven-starred Confederate flag -- an emotional symbol that continues to divide blacks and whites in the South. But in May the Judiciary Committee decided against renewal. And when Senator Jesse Helms, a proud son of the South, sneaked it in as part of a larger bill, he learned that he wasn't the only one who felt passionately about the Civil War.

The first black woman to sit in the Senate, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, had amassed a spotty record in her first seven months. But she took command of the Senate floor last week as she demanded that the legislators reconsider their approval of the patent. "This vote is about race. It is about racial symbols, the racial past, and the single most painful episode in American history." Her voice shaking, she declared, "It is absolutely unacceptable to me and to millions of Americans, black or white, that we would put the imprimatur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea." The Senate, busy on other matters, stopped to listen, and a lengthy debate ensued, with Southern Senators arguing for their nostalgia and heritage against Moseley-Braun's eloquent indignation. In the end, 27 Senators reversed themselves. The patent was not renewed.

The showdown in the U.S. Senate was just the most dramatic incident in a war against symbols that continues to haunt the South. The Confederate battle flag flew atop Alabama's capitol until a few months ago. Blacks in Mississippi are suing to remove the same emblem from their state flag. Georgia Governor Zell Miller's proposal to "purge the dark side of the Confederacy" -- again the battle emblem -- from that state flag failed earlier this year.

Other reminders have ended up on history's dustheap. In New Orleans, for example, Jefferson Davis Elementary has become Ernest N. Morial Elementary, named after the city's first black mayor. Two weeks ago, the New Orleans City Council voted to dismantle the Liberty Monument, a granite obelisk to white supremacy. The Ole Miss faculty in Oxford, Mississippi, passed a resolution seeking to end the playing of Dixie at school events. In Memphis, Tennessee, black activists may soon try to remove from a city park the bronze statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Some whites fear that soon all Confederate monuments, cemeteries and even Georgia's Stone Mountain, with its huge granite memorials to Confederate heroes, will vanish. "Our culture is being eradicated," says Charles Lunsford, spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. "When somebody declares war against your culture," he adds, "they're either going to back off or they're going to have a war."

"It's sort of like we've been labeled racists," said Tommie Phillips LaCavera, president general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "This is something our ancestors did over 100 years ago, and we're being punished for what they did. It has nothing to do with us." Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama could empathize with LaCavera: his family tree includes a grandfather who served as a Confederate surgeon and a signatory to Alabama's order of secession from the Union. But Heflin changed his vote and sided with Moseley- Braun last week. His forebears "might be spinning in their graves," he said, but "we must get racism behind us. We must move forward. We must realize we live in America today."

With reporting by Nancy Traver/Washington