Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

by Ty Seidule

In 1956, as a reaction to the requirement to integrate, the Georgia Assembly changed the state flag to incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag. As Denmark Groover, the legislator who guided the bill to passage, said at the time, “The Confederate symbol was added mostly out of defiance to federal integration orders.”14 While I lived in Georgia, the white supremacist Confederate Battle Flag dominated the state flag. In 2003, Georgia changed its flag, losing the Confederate Battle Flag and returning to a version of the flag first introduced in 1879. The current flag is an homage to the first Confederate national flag, the Stars and Bars. White southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.