School Waits ‘Hours’ To Remove Icky Confederate Battle Flag From Student Mural; What Took So Long?

By NBP Editorial Board | February 1, 2018, 19:48 EST

WARNING: The flag at the right bottom of the mural may be upsetting to some.

You know the old saying:  Here tonight, gone tomorrow.

A public elementary school in Hartford, Connecticut just that way removed a Confederate battle flag from a mural in the cafeteria this week.

A mother who saw it during an assembly on Tuesday at E.B. Kennelly School complained … and by the start of the school the next day it was gone, according to The Hartford Courant. A custodian popped off the tile that included the image too hurtful for little eyes.

Give the mother credit, though. She knows how it looks to go mucking around with a piece of art meant to explore history that was created by students 50 years ago. So she went into full doublespeak when she talked to a reporter about it.

Kamora Herrington, who is also coordinator of the mentoring program of True Colors, “a support and advocacy organization for sexual minority youth,” explained herself this way:

“The objects of our complicated history in our country should not be whitewashed away. We need to own them and explain them in context. But that flag displayed with the other flags gives it legitimacy.”

Translation:  We should whitewash them away. Forget context. Just pop off the tile.

And don’t explain nothing. You can get into trouble that way.

Like, when you say:  “That flag is the flag of the people who chose to attack my country.”

(Actually, those people, known as “the South,” thought they had the right to create their own country. And all the early battles of the Civil War took place in the South, not the North.)

Or:

“That has never been an American flag; it was the battle flag of the Confederacy, who used it to confront our country.”

(Actually, the various Confederate flags flew over territory including 9 million Americans. If you want to count only unenslaved Southerners, it was 5.5 million – or about 20 percent of the population of the entire United States in 1860.)

Or that you find it “offensive” that a Confederate flag could be “shared as part of our common history.”

(Would that “common history” include the Civil War?)

But never mind. Even the great art and history lover Joseph Stalin understood the limits of verisimilitude. If he’d have been at the school assembly, he’d have had the tile popped off, too.