Images like this one perpetuate the Left’s relentless lie that the Confederate flag is a Republican creation, rather than a Democratic invention.
As the Civil War began, the Army of Northern Virginia, led by eventual Democratic activist Robert E. Lee, adopted the battle flag that is under contention today. It became the secessionists’ national banner in 1863. Its designer, William T. Thompson, praised it in the Savannah Daily Morning News that May 4:
As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. Another merit in the new flag is, that it bears no resemblance to the now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals.
Two years later, that flag was in tatters. The North beat the South, and the Confederacy was gone with the wind.
How did this symbol of a pro-slavery breakaway republic wind up atop South Carolina’s state capitol? As the debate raged over civil rights in 1961, the Democratic legislature under Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, a Democrat, raised the Stars and Bars to mark the “Confederate War Centennial.”
About that time, Hollings presented a Confederate flag to President John F. Kennedy, another Democrat.
Of course, Democratic U.S. senators such as former KKK Grand Cyclops Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Tennessee’s Albert Gore Sr. (father of you know who), and Arkansas’s J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton’s mentor) stood shoulder to shoulder with Hollings and other segregationist Democratic governors, most notably Arkansas’s Orval Faubus and Alabama’s George Wallace. (Wallace installed the rebel flag over his statehouse in 1963, the day before Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy arrived to discuss integration.) While Byrd and Company filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these state executives blocked schoolhouse doors to exclude blacks.
Illinois’s Republican senator Everett Dirksen finally broke the bigoted Democrats’ filibuster and got the Civil Rights Act approved for the signature of Democratic president Lyndon Johnson.
