The Next Battle for the American Swastika

Travis Waldron notes that a next likely battle over the Confederate flag is at the high school level, with so many southern schools adopting it as their team mascot.

Since the Charleston massacre, the debates have resumed in several school districts. A school board committee in Arkansas voted last month to phase out Southside High’s Rebels nickname and immediately end its use of “Dixie,” the Confederate anthem, as its fight song. In Alabama, complaints from some residents prompted a community meeting about Vestavia Hills High School’s Rebels moniker. Local media have raised questions about symbols and mascots in Iowa and California, and the superintendent at Kentucky’s Allen Central High School, which also uses the Rebels name, last month removed old logos and photos that featured the Confederate flag from websites for the school and state athletic association.

But in other places, there has been no discussion of Confederate symbols since the Charleston shootings. And there are no plans for change.

In Hurley, Virginia, a small town tucked into the state’s southwestern corner, Hurley High School uses Confederate symbolism more directly than schools where debates are taking place. Hurley’s teams, known as the Rebels, don a logo that features the Confederate flag waving from a sword. The school’s Facebook page shows football players running onto the field beneath the Confederate flag after bursting through a homecoming banner on which a hand-drawn version of the battle flag is the most prominent feature.

“Since all of this has come about, our community has stood behind the logo and the flag,” Hurley High principal Pamela Dotson told The Huffington Post this week, echoing comments she made first to the Bristol Herald Courier.

This can get pretty nasty too. Unlike a state, which will have some level of racial and ideological diversity, on the school district level you may have very little racial or ideological diversity at all. This is going to be outsiders coming in and telling us in rural Kentucky or Alabama that we can’t have our flag–and our school symbol.

These are necessary fights–the American swastika must be driven from public life–but it’s going to as ugly as you can imagine.