by Tony Horwitz
To the waitress and many other whites, this assault on the rebel mascot by local elites, meeting behind closed doors, mirrored the assault on Westerman and his flag by angry young blacks. “They’re fixin’ to strip white people—whites that ain’t rich—of what little they got,” the waitress said.
The petition drive was led by a retired nurse named Frances Chapman. I called her from the grill to ask to come chat. En route, I stopped at Todd Central, a low-slung brick school with bright hallways and new computer labs. It looked like any other public high school, except for a vast mural in the foyer of the notorious mascot: two cartoonish Confederates clutching battle flags and blowing bugles emitting the words “Go, Rebels, Go.”
I was surprised that these flabby caricatures had provoked such a storm. They seemed to mock rather than exalt the Confederacy. But Frances Chapman didn’t see it that way. “The fat men, oooh, I think they’re wonderful!” she exclaimed. “They make me feel so proud.”
Chapman was a tiny woman with oversized glasses and an electric-green pants suit. Her words were equally arresting. As soon as I sat down, she showed me a newspaper story quoting her recent comments on a local radio show. “Slavery was not all that bad,” she’d declared. “A lot of people were quite happy to be living on large plantations.”
Chapman smiled sweetly. “Blacks just need to get over slavery,” she said, as though talking of the flu. “You can’t live in the past.”
I gently observed that she herself might be accused of living in the past by defending the rebel flag. “Oh no, that’s about now,” she said. “Blacks don’t really have anything against the flag. They just don’t want us to have it. They want the best jobs, the biggest money. Now they want this. If we lose the mascot, it’ll just be a matter of time before we lose everything.” Her voice quivered with rage. “Don’t put us where they used to be.”
It was the same bitterness I’d heard from Bud Sharpe, the pro-flag demonstrator in Columbia. For both Sharpe and Chapman, the rebel banner represented a finger in the dike, the last brake against a noisome tide of minority rights that was fast eroding the status of whites. “The pity of it is,” Chapman went on, “blacks have a great legacy. They had Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, George Washington Carver. They first learned dancing and singing—we learned that from them.”
Chapman had learned something else from blacks: the idiom and tactics of civil rights. She and her supporters had launched a school boycott, with scores of white families pulling their kids out of Todd Central and threatening to withhold county taxes unless the rebel mascot was retained. They also planned a sit-in at the next school board meeting. Chapman had printed a special T-shirt for the protest, adorned with the Confederate flag and the words: SHOW RESPECT—You’re in Rebel Country.
Seeing me to the door, Chapman raised her small fist above her head. “We shall overcome,” she said.
THE NEXT DAY at Elkton’s library, I learned a strange thing. Todd County wasn’t rebel country, at least not historically. According to the volumes of local history I perused, most Todd Countians supported the Union in the Civil War. Like much of the upper South, the county split along geographic lines. Whites from the county’s fertile plantations bordering Tennessee tended to side with the South. But the more numerous yeoman farmers in Todd County’s hilly north (where slaves were few) supported the Union. Kentucky also stayed in the Union, though the first Confederate Congress optimistically allotted a star for Kentucky on the Confederacy’s flag in hopes the state might secede.
Despite this history, almost all whites I spoke to echoed Frances Chapman, proclaiming their county rebel territory and believing it had always been so. As proof, they pointed to a 351-foot concrete spike soaring at the county’s western edge. The obelisk marked the birthsite of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who was born there in 1808 (only a hundred miles and eight months apart from his future antagonist, Abraham Lincoln).
The obelisk was identical in shape to the Washington Monument and two-thirds as tall. Rebel veterans, who first planned the memorial in the early 1900s, believed the father of the Confederacy deserved a memorial almost as lofty as the one honoring the father of the nation. But the shaft’s Ozymandian dimensions belied the slightness of Todd County’s claims on Jeff Davis. At the time of his birth, Todd County didn’t yet exist (it was carved out of neighboring Christian County a decade later). Nor could anyone say for certain whether the Davis’s log homestead had stood on the Todd side of today’s county line. Also, Davis’s parents were peripatetic folk; they moved to Louisiana when “little Jeff” was two. It seemed doubtful the Confederate leader had any memories of his old Kentucky home.
No matter. Each year on Davis’s birthday, Todd Countians crowded around the spike for a bizarre rite: the crowning of a local teenager as “Miss Confederacy.” Contestants were judged on their poise, hair, hooped skirt, and answers to questions such as, “What will you do while holding the title to promote and defend Southern heritage?” At the end of the pageant, a young man in Confederate uniform escorted the tiara-clad winner down the monument steps as a local band played “Dixie.”
Robert Penn Warren, who watched the monument’s construction as a child, later recalled the bemusement he felt as this “immobile thrust of concrete” soared above his native soil. Remembrance of the Confederacy, he wrote, “had never been of burning importance in Guthrie, where to a certain number of contemporary citizens the Civil War seemed to have been fought for the right to lynch without legal interference.”
But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term “recovered memory.” Locals had reclaimed a past of their own creation, in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” Robert Penn Warren once wrote. “Except the jump backward.”
AS FRANCES CHAPMAN had promised, hundreds of people packed the bleachers of a middle-school gym for the next meeting of the Todd County school board. Some wore kepis and rebel-flag bandannas, others the “SHOW RESPECT—You’re in Rebel Country” T-shirts Chapman had printed for the meeting.
A few black families sat by the exit, as did all four members of the Sheriff’s Department. The school board perched around a table on the gym floor, awkwardly conducting routine business. Finally, as the crowd grew restive, a board member set up a microphone and invited the public to comment.
The first to speak was a military widow. “My husband was a Yankee and I converted him to a rebel and I’m damn proud of it!” she shouted. “I will not compromise my values and equal rights to satisfy a minority. God bless America, God bless our rebel flag!” She threw open her cardigan to reveal the “SHOW RESPECT” T-shirt she wore underneath. The crowd behind her roared.
Next, a lean, bleached-blonde woman strode to the microphone and jabbed her finger at the school board. “Listen to us—we put you there!” Flushed with rage, she said her son at Todd Central was forced to take off a rebel-flag T-shirt the week after Westerman’s murder. Metal detectors had also been installed at the school to prevent further violence.
“They even took away my boy’s pepper spray!” someone shouted from the bleachers.
“Sure ain’t right!” the woman at the microphone yelled.
The crowd began stamping its feet and chanting, “Discrimination! Discrimination!” As the woman returned to her seat, she pumped her fists in the air like a prizefighter leaving the ring.
The meeting went on like this for two hours. As the twentieth or so woman spat venom at the school board, it struck me that recent media attention lavished on “angry white males” neglected the considerable depths of female rage on display here, and everywhere else I’d been in Todd County. Nor did their wrath have much to do with the rebel flag’s historic symbolism. The banner seemed instead to have floated free from its moorings in time and place and become a generalized “Fuck You,” a middle finger raised with ulceric fury in t
he face of blacks, school officials, authority in general—anyone or anything that could shoulder some blame for these women’s difficult lives. Tonight, at least, these trailer-bound, factory-trapped women could vent their rage and affirm the race consciousness that blacks had exhibited for decades, even flashing their “RESPECT” shirts with Aretha-like pride.
Frances Chapman claimed the last word. Waving her petition, which now bore 3,000 names, a quarter of the county’s population, she shouted, “Don’t ever count us out!” Then she and the other whites stormed from the gym and into the flurrying snow. They lingered outside, waving flags and shouting, as though vaguely dissatisfied. Neither the school board nor the few blacks at the meeting had responded.
Inside the gym, a half-dozen black women stood waiting for the parking lot to clear. “I work in Todd County,” one woman said softly. “I pay my taxes and my children go to school, too. I feel like, why shouldn’t we have a say about the school mascot? Kids are killing kids over this. Don’t you think it’s time we at least start talking about it?”
I asked why she hadn’t made this sensible comment during the meeting. She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Who’s listening?” she asked.
Another woman had the blank, haunted look of a shell-shocked soldier. Before Michael Westerman’s death, she said, white rancor toward blacks was contained. “We were living with it. I felt like they respected us.” But now she wondered if she’d been fooling herself her whole life. “That flag opens up a racial door we’ve been keeping closed for so many years. It’s a way of saying what white people have kept bottled up.”
She paused as the sound of chanting—“equal rights for whites!”—drifted through the open gym door. The woman shook her head. “They’ve gone loco on us,” she said.
IN THE WEEK FOLLOWING the school meeting, I made the rounds of local officials, ministers and long-time residents, searching for clues about what was happening to Todd County. From both blacks and whites came the same, bewildered refrain. Though Jim Crow hadn’t been as rigid in Kentucky as it was farther South, the past three decades had witnessed extraordinary change. Blacks and whites mingled freely at schools, workplaces, restaurants and other public places. Yet for reasons no one fully understood, this intimacy had spawned a subterranean rage, which had boiled over with the shooting of Michael Westerman and the tumult following his death.
“We’re a little ol’ Southern Mayberry,” Guthrie’s mayor told me. “Or I thought we were.” A portly man of thirty-six, he’d campaigned for mayor of the town of 1,600 with the slogan “I’m a good guy and will work hard for you.” I found him fastidiously sweeping Guthrie’s diminutive town hall. “When I was a boy, no one cared about that flag,” he went on. “Heck, I never even thought of myself as Southern. But today there’s this intolerance, white and black. People feel they have to wave their beliefs in each other’s faces.”
A few blocks away, a middle-aged black storekeeper echoed the mayor’s words. “Kids today, they’re weaker and wiser,” she said, sifting turnip greens and smoking Kools. “A lot of things we didn’t pay attention to, they do. If we were called nigger, we shook it off. Just went about our business. Not now. It’s strange, my kids have white friends, which I never did. But they got white enemies, too.”
Michael Westerman’s brief life seemed to typify this paradox. He grew up on the same street of modest brick ranch homes as two of the black youths who would later be charged with his murder. They went to the same schools and shot hoops in the Westermans’ driveway. Michael’s father, a tenant farmer, served on the volunteer fire department with relatives of the black teenagers. Michael’s mother ran a sewing machine at Guthrie Garment, a plant whose workforce was evenly divided between black and white. At Todd Central, interracial dating had become common. A few months before Michael’s death, a black student was voted Homecoming Queen over several white competitors.
But amid this apparent racial amity, a low-grade guerrilla war brewed between some blacks and whites. Earlier generations of blacks in Todd County had quietly endured exaltation of Jeff Davis, the rebel flag, and the defunct nation for which it stood. Black athletes at Todd Central dribbled basketballs across a gym floor painted with the school’s rebel mascot; they wore class rings decorated with rebel emblems; they bought the “Rebel” yearbook, which for many years included a photo of two students annually anointed “The General and His Southern Lady” and pictured in hoop skirt and Confederate uniform.
“Back then, parents told you to sit your butt down, work hard and keep your mouth shut around white people,” said Kim Gardner, a Todd Central student in the late 1970s. I was visiting Gardner at her trailer outside Elkton. Her daughter Shanekia, a junior at Todd Central, sat beside her mother in tight jeans and Timberland boots, beneath a poster of Malcolm X. As I spoke with Kim, Shanekia shook her head. “We aren’t going to just take it like our parents did,” she said. “I keep telling Momma times has changed.”
Times had changed across the South, and in some ways Todd County was just catching up. Though black hostility to Confederate totems lay relatively dormant for two decades after the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, it resurfaced in the mid-1980s and had escalated ever since. In 1987, the NAACP launched a campaign to lower Confederate flags from Southern capitols and eventually helped bring Alabama’s down. Black cheerleaders refused to carry the rebel flag at college ball games. Schools started banning “Old South” weekends and the playing of “Dixie.” In some cities, blacks called for the removal of Confederate monuments and rebel street names. And in 1993, black senator Carol Moseley-Braun successfully challenged renewal of the patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia, which incorporated the Confederacy’s political banner.
But this growing militancy provoked a backlash among Southern whites, many of whom already felt aggrieved over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, affirmative action, and other race-tinged issues. Self-styled “Southern heritage” or “Southern nationalist” groups mushroomed across the region, preaching the gospel of states’ rights, regional pride and reverence for the Confederacy.
These groups also cleverly tapped into the culture of self-esteem and identity politics common across the land. When Spike Lee’s movie on Malcolm X launched a wave of “X” clothing, a counter-symbol quickly sprouted on T-shirts and bumper stickers across the white South. It showed the diagonal cross of the rebel flag beside the words “You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine.”
BY THE TIME Marcus Flippin became a teacher and sports coach at Todd Central in 1992, students were brandishing their separate Xs like duelling pistols. A white kid would show up in a rebel-flag bandanna, a black kid in an X cap. A fight would break out, and the next day still more students would show up wearing Xs and start the cycle over again.
Flippin, one of only three black teachers at the school, became a sounding board for black students. “They’d see on the news about the flag coming down in Alabama, or ‘Dixie’ being banned,” he said, “and they’d come to me and ask, ‘How come whites still get away with that stuff here?’”
Flippin also realized that coaches of visiting sports teams were using Todd Central’s rebel logo to whip up their own black players, saying, “You know that flag represents slavery and the Klan. We have to go over and show those racists.” Flippin convinced school officials to repaint the gym floor with an innocuous outline of Todd County. This only enraged white students still more. Graffiti started appearing in school bathrooms: “KKK,” “Go Back to Africa,” “How to have a good time—kill Niggers!” One afternoon, as black students waited for a bus in front of the school, a white student drove by in his truck; hitched to the bumper was a chain with a black Barbie doll dragging from the end. Both black and white students started packing knives and guns in their cars and pickups.
Flippin tried to calm both blacks and whites, but felt he simply couldn’t break through. “I don’t know if it’s the movies, the music, the music videos,” he said, “but there’s n
o respect for adults, or for human life. You just had the feeling all the time that something bad was about to happen.”
MARCUS FLIPPIN’S FIRST YEAR at Todd Central was the last for Michael Westerman, who graduated in 1993. A tall, slim teenager with long dark hair and an engaging smile, Michael was named the Future Homemakers of America “sweetheart” his senior year. A mediocre student, he struggled through with the help of his longtime girlfriend, Hannah Laster. They married soon after graduation and went to work at a sawmill owned by Hannah’s father. Michael cut timber, Hannah drove the forklift.
The sawmill lay on a gravel road in the hilly northern half of Todd County. Hannah’s parents, Billy and Nancy Laster, lived in a home they’d built themselves beside the mill. “None of this would’a happened if everyone had just stuck to their own,” Billy said. He was built like the oak trees that churned through his mill, and prescribed hard work as the remedy for all ills.
His wife hewed to a biblical injunction against cutting hair; hers was pinned in a gray helmet that rose a full six inches above her head. “Michael picked and plucked at people and laughed about everything,” she said. He raced his four-wheeler, played pranks, made animal noises, licked his sister’s face, told jokes about fat people. When he wasn’t cutting logs, Michael wore what amounted to a personal uniform: black Levis, black cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a huge silver-plated belt buckle.
