Editorial: A Confederate flag comes down, and history moves

What were GOP Congress and Rep. Ken Calvert thinking?

Through our modern eyes, the removal of the Confederate flag on Friday from outside the South Carolina State House may have struck some as welcome but overwrought and long overdue.

All that pomp. All those uniforms. All that solicitous standing at attention.

A century and a half after the Civil War, 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, it still took the racist murder of nine stunningly good human beings — plus an almost super-human expression of forgiveness by the victims’ traumatized survivors — just to persuade one batch of Southern politicians to take down a banner glorifying slavery and oppression.

For the families of the dead, it must have been like a wake for a swastika.

And yet, through the lens of history, that ceremony was a milestone. Anyone who has spent time in the South knows how hard it has been for many descendents of Civil War rebels to collectively swallow their pride.

If they didn’t know, conservative Southern Republicans in Congress were there this week to remind them, enlisting California’s own U.S. Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, to push for Confederate grave-decoration privileges in national cemeteries.

The move, subsequently withdrawn, was a breathtaking blunder and an embarrassment to California. (What in the world were you thinking, Rep. Calvert?)

But the fact that House leaders put the Corona Republican up to it shows how stubbornly the white South has held onto that ugly symbol, and how chronically the rest of us have indulged them. On Friday, as South Carolina let go, the nation exhaled.

Now, there’s the sense that all sides have been heard, and may even be ready to move forward a little. There’s no time to lose.

As in the rest of the nation, demographics are already trumping the South’s old black-and-white demons. The governors of South Carolina and Louisiana are children of immigrants from Punjab. Between 2000 and 2010, the Hispanic population more than doubled in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina.

In a global economy, corporations see no profit in enabling bigots. And young people increasingly see race as their parents’ issue.

It is beyond exasperating that the victims of racism had to bend over backward just to extract a modicum of humanity in South Carolina. But after 150 years, that sacrifice has broken a crippling logjam.

The white South has much to answer for — that flag was just a down payment — but the rest of the world is watching through the lens of the future. It’s time for this nation to reconcile and get down to business. Friday is already over. History is already on the move.

This story was originally published July 10, 2015 at 8:58 AM with the headline "Editorial: A Confederate flag comes down, and history moves."