The Enduring Racism Symbolized by the Confederate Flag

I grew up living next door to a White family who daily flew a confederate flag on the side of their home that bordered our adjacent property. They also erected a barbed wire fence the length of our six-acre lot and placed no trespassing signs upon each post. Their three German Shepherds were trained as attack dogs to ensure that my siblings and I wouldn’t dare approach their property, even for retrieving a ball that might have accidentally went over the fence while we played. I learned more about the meaning of the Confederate Flag from our neighbors than I ever learned in any American history class.

Our families knew each other only from names on documents of court cases filed by our neighbors to prevent us from moving into our home. Without any known building codes, our neighbors simply deemed our lot too narrow for the size of the home that my parents had built. We never exchanged a word with our neighbors, yet they were aware of the only thing they needed to know about us in order to take action. We were Black.

As soon as we move in, they quickly positioned the confederate flag, erected the barbed wire fence and trained their dogs to attack. They raised the confederate flag every day not just as a reminder to us that we weren’t welcomed, but to etch into our psyche that America belonged to White people.