Mike Celizic

Steve Spurrier is right. It’s time to retire the Confederate flag. Germany doesn’t fly the Nazi swastika; South Carolina shouldn’t fly the Southern Cross.

This shouldn’t be a subject for debate. You can rationalize the emblem of the Confederacy all you want, but you can not deny that it represents the old South and slavery just as surely as the swastika represents the Holocaust. To fly that flag is an insult not just to African-Americans whose ancestors were brought to these shores as slaves, but to every American who finds that part of our history to be repugnant. I would hope that would be the vast majority of the country.

Spurrier didn’t say any of that Saturday. He just said, according to the AP, “My opinion is we don’t need the Confederate flag at our Capitol. I don’t really know anybody that wants it there, but I guess there are a lot of South Carolinians that do want it there.”

He was at a dinner to receive an award after coaching his University of South Carolina Gamecocks in their spring game. Someone asked him a question, and, after admitting he’s not supposed to say anything political, he went ahead and said “that dang, damn Confederate flag” should go.

Spurrier has pragmatic reasons for his distaste. He’s had recruits decide to go to other states that don’t still fly the flag that slavery’s defenders fought under.

The state, too, should have pragmatic reasons for ditching it. The NCAA, which is waging battle against American-Indian mascots and nicknames, also has declared that no championships or tournaments can be scheduled in South Carolina until it gets rid of that flag. I’ve never been the NCAA’s biggest booster, but I congratulate it on this one.

Only Mississippi still incorporates the Confederate flag into its state flag; Georgia finally removed it from its flag in 2003. But South Carolina used to fly the flag from the statehouse roof in addition to the state flag.

Now, it flies it at a Confederate memorial on the statehouse grounds.

South Carolina was the first state to secede and it fired the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. So it’s got a lot invested in the war that claimed more American lives than all other wars the nation has fought combined. I’m not sure I’d be proud of that, but apparently South Carolina is.

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The causes of the war were many, but the split in the nation came down to slavery. The South’s agricultural economy was based on it; the North’s industrial economy wasn’t. And while most Northerners fought to preserve the Union and not to free the slaves, accomplishing the first goal also accomplished the second.

Southerners argue that the flag represents an entire way of life, but that’s not really true.

That way of life existed under the Stars and Stripes until the Civil War, when the secessionists had to invent a new flag for its short-lived nation. The Southern Cross represents that country, and the distinguishing feature that identified it was slaves.