On Friday, July 10th the Confederate battle flag that has flown for over half a century over South Carolina’s capitol grounds was taken down. That’s a good idea as far as I’m concerned.

Back in the 1990s when the Confederate emblem on the Georgia state flag was a hotly debated issue I thought removing the symbol of the Lost Cause was a good idea. Whatever official flag a state flies should be as inclusive as possible of all the state’s residents. And the vehement defenders of the flag as “heritage not hate” should have put as much effort in defending it against segregationists and racists who co-opted it as a symbol of white supremacy if they wanted to be taken seriously. I also remember discussing the issue with a black friend and coworker who told me her issue was that the emblem was state sanctioned. “Put it in a museum.”, she said. And I agreed.

The “put it in a museum” line has been parroted over and over since South Carolina’s flag became even more of a bone of contention than it already was after nine black people were gunned down in cold blood in Charleston last month. Photos of the alleged perpetrator and white supremacist brandishing the battle flag were posted online. At this point the flag is certainly as divisive as it’s ever been. It has become so toxic that people are losing their jobs for displaying it publicly. And the image has prompted widespread removal of the Confederate flag from retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, and Apple video games. Warner Bros. got into the act, too, when they announced they would cease the licensing of die-cast replicas and vehicle model kits featuring the General Lee car from the Georgia-produced TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard” because of the flag on its roof. TV Land even stopped broadcasting reruns of the old sitcom.

Now it appears that mounting pressure is testing the lie that we should put that symbol in a museum, because now there are calls to take it out of museums. The National Park Service severely limited the sale of Confederate flag merchandise in gift shops last month after the Charleston church massacre, and U.S. House Republican leaders have yanked a controversial vote on keeping Confederate battle flags in national parks.

Georgia State Rep. LaDawn Jones, D-Atlanta, called on residents to boycott Stone Mountain Park until the Confederate flags there come down. Calls for a 4th of July boycott failed miserably as many turned out to celebrate the holiday. In fact, the park officially shut the gates to traffic after reaching its full capacity at 6:15 pm. In the wake of this development the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is reconsidering whether it will hold its annual conference at the park. Said spokeswoman Jean Tate:

“The Atlanta Fed is committed to diversity and is sensitive to the concerns raised surrounding the display of confederate (sic) flags at Stone Mountain State Park. Each year, the Bank evaluates potential venues for the Financial Markets Conference, taking into consideration costs and other criteria. With that in mind, the concerns raised by the display of the flags will be a part of the evaluation process moving forward.”

John Bankhead with the Stone Mountain Memorial Association attempted to clarify the park’s position on the matter last week:

“It’s not an endorsement [of the Confederacy] at all. It’s just a representation of the historical context as a museum for the Confederacy on what flags flew over during that time period. Stone Mountain is preserved by state law as a Confederate memorial. The law that changed the flag to our current state flag also expressly prohibited changes at Stone Mountain Park. Some on both sides of these issues have said that these Confederate symbols belong in a museum. Here in Georgia, Stone Mountain Park serves that purpose.”

And now comes a renewed call for removal of the park’s Confederate Memorial Carving — the largest high relief sculpture in the world — which depicts three Confederate heroes of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Georgia Democrats are now urging the state to quit celebrating Confederate Memorial Day and Confederate Heritage Month, and the state has stopped selling license plates with the battle emblem after Gov. Nathan Deal announced a “redesign” of the tags. Now that the ball is really rolling the list is growing for more things to ban, names to change, monuments to take down, mascots to get rid of and bodies to dig up. One wonders if the hundreds of Civil War markers and plaques that dot the South will be targeted as well in this effort to erase history. Someone even came up with the bright idea to file hate crime charges for merely flying the Confederate flag — the ones that aren’t being stolen, that is.

But is all this actually going to change anything? Well, not according to CNN who reported that taking away these reminders of the Confederacy “isn’t going to solve the sole issue that is at hand with the world — racism!” Another article reported that taking down the offending piece of cloth from the South Carolina statehouse grounds, “doesn’t mean a damn thing”. A recent Huffington Post piece called for “Republicans, [to] Take Down That Flag — And Stand Up for Voting Rights”. (Nice trick by the Democrats to foist the burden on Republicans when it was the Democrats in the 1950s who embraced the battle flag to protest desegregation.) The author posits that, “doing away with official reverence for the flag is largely a symbolic move that doesn’t come close to addressing the problems surrounding race in America”. How typical in this day and age that symbolism over substance drives this “extraordinary narrative of good and evil”.