Charleston City Paper: One man’s love of the Rebel flag

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

1

From Charleston City Paper, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, with the writer talking about his long-held love of the Rebel flag. Here’s a section where he mentions Asheville’s flag activist, H.K. Edgerton:

See, Edgerton was once the president of the Asheville, N.C., chapter of the NAACP. He was ousted from his position when a photograph of him standing with two men with ties to alleged white supremacists ran in the Asheville Citizen-Times. In the image, all three are holding white napkins — each one folded into the shape of a triangle — to their foreheads. It was a thing of bizarre beauty, an image that was so shocking because it simply could not be predicted.

I spoke with Edgerton about his beliefs that all was well between blacks and whites before the Civil War and wrote an article about him and black Confederates. Later, I met up with him again as he began his long march from Asheville to Texas carrying the Confederate battle flag.

After meeting Edgerton and reading about Cousin Arthur and his “heritage not hate” brethren, it seemed to me there were only two types of folks who were slavishly devoted to the Rebel flag. On the one hand, you had bigots like my grandpa. And on the other, you had folks who believed in a fantasyland version of the Old South, one that was straight out of Walt Disney’s Song of the South.