I can best begin expressing what emotion the confederate flag stirs in me by relating an incident that occurred in Elberton, Georgia, the place of my birth, when I was 14 years old. In the Fall of 1981, I watched as the driver of a maroon pick-up trucked complemented with a weapons rack, weapons and draped with a full confederate flag in its back window floored the gas and sped recklessly in the path of my twelve year old sister and three younger brothers.
        Earlier that morning, we had begun our daily half-mile walk down a winding country dirt road to the bus stop on the main county highway. On that day, I left out of the house around five minutes after my siblings for just another day at school. As I headed out on the small winding road, I heard a loud roaring sound, YEEEE HAWWW!!!!, YEEEE HAWW!!! - most commonly called the rebel yell- quickly closing in behind me. I had always heard about these scenes growing up in the South, but somehow thought it would never happen to me.
        A fear engulfed me as I talked to myself, "I hope I'm not going to be killed, please God, I don't wanna die like this." The truck with three Caucasian men came to a screeching halt and pulled up next to me. The young intoxicated men demanded, "Nigger, you want a ride, get in, get in, get on back!" They screamed, while motioning with their heads and hands for me to get on the back of the truck. I began deliberating, how to get out of this situation. The most horrid word associated with blacks and the confederate flag went through my mind at that very moment, lynching, a word that a child shouldn't have known. The truck laden with the confederate flag parked beside me. "No thank you," in a trembling voice, "Get on boy!" They all continued to yell. I began looking for my escape route through the woods. Suddenly, a beer can flew out of the vehicle and struck me in the arm. As I began my flight to escape possible death, the truck sped off towards my siblings. I had to think and fast.
        At that moment, I began pleading with God for my brothers' and sister's lives. They had been looking back at the noisy truck during my ordeal and realized that something was not quite right. They were not sure what had happened, but understood that there was a problem. They begin moving towards the side of the road and towards the wood line as the truck sped towards them. From where I was standing at that moment, all I could imagine was my siblings being completely flattened and killed by the men. Fortunately, the truck came to a screeching halt right behind my brothers and sister, and the three men hurled only obscenities and sped off. My siblings and I just experienced what it meant to be black in a small southern town in 1902, or in this case 1982.
        I would eventually find out the culprit of this incident. When we contacted the local sheriff and provided him a tag number, a number that was seared into my memory, he never could find out who the perpetrators were. This random act of terror infuriated me and for several weeks, I carried this consuming hatred and a heightened perception of racial matters.
        Several months later on a school field trip to the city police station, I would find out. "This is a state of the art computer system that has all of the vehicles registered with the Georgia Department of Vehicle Registration." I raised my hand, "Sir, so if I gave you a tag number, and you could tell me who owned the vehicle?" At that moment, I was infuriated as I thought of my mother talking with the local sheriff with an almost contemptuous demeanor over the several weeks after the incident, "Mrs. Thornton, we're looking into it, and we'll contact you when we find out something." Well, at the city police station, as the police officer continued to explain this computer system, I asked, " Sir, can you put in tag number, SY 1156? "Sure" he replied. The computer began its search, took around a minute or so, and kicked back the results. "Young man, that vehicle would belong to a Mr. Michael Carter at address..." It was that easy. As a child, I guessed to myself that the sheriff just didn't care about black people. Since the law didn't help, my mom and I shared the culprit's name with all of my uncles and school officials in case anything every happened again. Lat, the bus driver, was kind enough to pick us up from our home to lessen the chances of this incident happening again.
        I carry no malice; however, the confederate flag reminds me of how cruel human beings can be to one another and the spirit of racism that still today permeates the different institutions in America. People of color and different cultures are often reminded of this evil spirit in the symbols of the South's way of life, particularly in the smallest of Georgia's 159 counties and other landscapes across the nation. The state of hatred that came over me due to the incident with the truck didn't last long because in spite of the bad experience, my mom always taught us kids to exercise love towards all people, but I still feel an awareness and keen understanding of racial matters that will never leave me.
        Before this incident, I had lived in two other larger cities in Georgia. I was born in Elberton in 1967 and my family moved away in the early part of 1971 to Savannah, Georgia, where my father was completing his last two years of undergraduate studies at Savannah State College. Following completion of his degree in 1973, the family moved back to Elberton for eight months during my father's transitional period between Savannah State and the Medical College of Georgia as a medical student in Augusta, Georgia. We lived in Augusta from 1973 to 1981.
        As a child in the beautiful antebellum city of Savannah, we lived in a nice working class neighborhood in the heart of the city which was a very segregated. There was very little meaningful social interaction amongst the races. Walking on lovely River Street on the Savannah River, a couple of miles from my home, you could see the symbols of the old south and confederate culture all around. From one of the largest cotton gins complete with a water shipping dock located in the center of the city's business district to confederate memorials to their fallen heroes and one of the largest confederate cemeteries in the South. In addition, the black maids, butlers, and other menial laborers working around the mansions and gorgeous homes in the historic district that still exist to this present day. All the institutions that I lived in were very homogenous. Savannah, in a genteel way, illuminated the way of life that modern day confederate flag waving citizens want to preserve and call their heritage.
        In Augusta, which was some 40 miles away from Elberton, there still were challenges in race relations. However, the Augusta community possessed a more progressive atmosphere due to the influence of a large academic community and a large military base, Fort Gordon. Augusta was a lovely city and the institutions were similar to Savannah, however, there was more social interaction between the races. The only racial tension that I should recall during my childhood in Augusta was in the late 1970s, when Alex Haley's movie, Roots, was shown to the world. The cruelty of southern chattel slavery that the movie portrayed caused racial fights and tensions for the rest of our sixth grade school year. It was in Augusta, where I first experienced full integration in the different institutions. My family's relocation in 1981 back to Elberton, Georgia was a shock and reintroduction of the true essence of the old south and the confederacy. Elberton didn't have the gentility of Savannah or the progressiveness of Augusta. It had the ugly reality of "you people have your place and we have ours, don't forget it." I began to understand why my mother would say in Augusta, "I never want to move back to Elberton if I can help it."
        One of the things that I truly appreciated about certain parts of the South and its people were definite positions on race and race relations. One knew without any doubt, where you stood in relation to opportunities, justice, and growing up in the Deep South, the socialization, and the effects of this poisonous system. It is different in the North. Where I now live, however, the confederate flag debate in the Presidential campaign trail of 2000 brought some very defined positions across the United States on this flag and its meaning. The debate on the confederate flag hit the Michigan Tech campus in the thick of the debate in March of 2000. I read articles in the Michigan Tech Lode, the campus newspaper, on "Why the Confederate Flag should Fly?" by a young white student, who admitted in his article that he never had been to the South, but didn't see the big deal with South Carolina flying the confederate flag. I asked myself, " I wonder if this young man had ever had a meaningful relationship or conversation about the flag with a black person?