The newspaper article reproduced below proves one thing:
South Carolina Legislator Glenn McConnell Was Right!
After having been savaged for several years by radical Sons of Confederate veterans and their neo-secessionist co-conspirators, McConnell’s compromise which removed a 1950s era Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol building dome and placed an appropriate battleflag on capitol grounds has had the desired effect: The flag is a historically correct Army of Northern Virginia infantry flag. The flag is much more visible. It waves in a proper historical context beside a monument to soldiers who served under it. As part of the agreement, South Carolina has a Confederate heritage day and Confederate street names and markers are protected. Simultaneously, the NAACP, in clinging to a boycott that everyone is ignoring, looks like a group of spoiled children who didn’t get enough candy.
Boycott having little impact
But NAACP says it has no plans to drop 5-year-old sanctions against S.C.
By ALLEN G. BREED
The Associated Press
MYRTLE BEACH - If Crystal Hunt and Marquita Jackson were looking to draw attention, they succeeded. Wolf whistles and honking horns followed the bikini-clad duo as they strutted down Ocean Boulevard.
Hunt was wearing a red-white-and-blue Confederate battle flag wrap over her white two-piece, Jackson a bra bearing the familiar diagonal blue cross and white stars co-opted by the Ku Klux Klan.
You could say the two black women were thumbing their noses at the NAACP’s 5-year-old boycott of South Carolina except for one thing: Neither of the 21-year-old North Carolina women had any idea there even was a boycott.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People started the boycott in 2000 to get the Confederate battle flag off the South Carolina State House dome. That goal was achieved in July of that year, but the organization continued the sanctions when the flag was moved to a memorial on the State House grounds -- a place of honor the group feels the flag doesn’t deserve.
But judging from the columns of black motorcyclists zooming up and down the Grand Strand during the recent "Black Bike Week," few are heeding the call.
"I spend my money wherever I want to," Jackson, a stay-at-home mom from Fayetteville, N.C., said defiantly as she headed for the beach Memorial Day weekend. "They don’t give it to me."
In the early days of the boycott, business and civic organizations canceled conventions at Palmetto State venues and pickets stood vigil at highway welcome centers. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, under pressure from black coaches, declared a moratorium on scheduling new events in South Carolina or Mississippi, whose state flag incorporates the Confederate banner.
The NCAA moratorium still stands, and some presidential candidates campaigning in the state last year were careful to bring their own food and stay at supporters’ homes to avoid feeding the local economy. But the boycott has largely slipped from the public eye and out of most people’s minds.
"I’ll be honest with you, we no longer see any significant or measurable impact from that -- haven’t since the flag came down," said Marion Edmonds, spokesman for the Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism.
The NAACP insists the boycott is still having an effect. But hard numbers are difficult to come by.
If there has been an effect, it is not reflected in tourism-related tax collections, Edmonds said. According to his agency, accommodations tax receipts increased $3.5 million during the boycott period, and admissions tax collections grew $2.5 million -- slow but steady.
Edmonds thinks event planners saw the removal of the flag from the State House dome -- where it was raised to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War and remained flying in defiance of the civil rights movement -- as "a good-faith effort."
Steve Camp, president of the Midlands Authority for Conventions Sports and Tourism in Columbia, said he still fields calls about whether the boycott is on -- and still has people tell him they'll take their convention business elsewhere.
"I don’t know that we lose money," he said. "I think that we lose opportunity."
For instance, Camp would love to pursue the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but he knows that’s a nonstarter as long as that flag remains on the State House grounds.
In the meantime, he’s grateful such organizations as the Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Association -- a small conference of historically black Southern colleges -- agreed to return its basketball tournament to Columbia this year.
"We just need to leave that issue alone," conference president Willie Jefferson said. "We can call for that boycott from now to the 22nd century, and things still will not change."
Dwight James, executive director of the NAACP’s state conference, said the need to maintain the boycott transcends mundane economics. He said one needs only to have attended the black biker festival over the Memorial Day holiday in Myrtle Beach to witness "the Confederate mentality" he sees as still rampant in South Carolina.
When the predominantly white Carolina Harley-Davidson Dealers Association held its annual rally in the beach resort the week before, traffic along Ocean Boulevard was the usual two-way affair. But when the black riders came to town, orange cones went up, and the popular strip was limited to southbound traffic.
For two years, the NAACP has battled the city in federal court over what the organization sees as an "apartheid traffic pattern" imposed during the five-day festival.
Though angry over the one-way traffic and jacked-up hotel rates, the black bikers were not going to let their fun in the sun be spoiled by a perceived hostile environment -- or by a boycott called by NAACP officials.
"I mean, they represent me and stuff, but at the same time, they do expect a whole lot," said Maurice Christian, a 28-year-old car dealer from Raleigh.
Some visitors questioned the boycott’s logic.
Sitting in a lawn chair outside his hotel on the strip, Lamar Banks, an Air Force staff sergeant from Hampton, Va., said: "Most of the people working in these hotels, cleaning the rooms, sitting at the front desk are African-American. So if we don’t come down here, then we’re taking money out of their pocket and food off their table. How’s that helping us as a whole?"
Hunt, one of the bathing suit rebels, says the NAACP should be focusing on more important things, like educating poor black youth. If the boycott hasn’t achieved its objective in five years, she said, it never will.
"It’s silly," said Hunt, a criminal justice student at Fayetteville State University. "It’s a new millennium. Everybody’s not worried about a flag."
Save the SCV editor’s note: As implied by the article, there is an unintended yet significant consequence to the flag compromise. Young African-Americans realize that their lives were not materially improved by the relocation of the flag, nor would their lives be improved by the flag’s removal. The challenges that face their community still exist. The NAACP continues to waste time and effort on a window-dressing issue. - Walt Hilderman