Flag without a country

How is it that black Georgians can accept a state flag based on the Confederate national banner when the rebel battle flag is unacceptable? For the same reasons Southern heritage supporters can't, says John Coski.

Because hardly anybody recognizes the "Stars and Bars" as a Confederate symbol.

"It's kind of a stealth Confederate flag," says Coski, historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., and a scholar of the flag's evolution. "A flag that doesn't have baggage also doesn't have that content that inspires."

When it comes to their flags, Coski says, Southerners have always had an identity crisis.

The first national flag -- with its blue field and white stars, and three horizontal stripes of red and white -- was chosen precisely because of its resemblance to Old Glory, Coski says.

But as the Civil War raged on, and casualties mounted, the sense of separateness grew. And, Coski says, Southerners decided to drop that "detested rag that looks so much like the old flag" and design a flag "befitting a truly independent people."

The second national flag was a simple white banner with the red and blue St. Andrew's Cross in one corner. Some knew it as "the stainless banner." The battle flag became the symbol of Southern nationalism and the Southern soldier.

And through its adoption by the Ku Klux Klan, it has also become a recognizable symbol of hate and white supremacy.

"The flag of the government should be the one that takes the most heat," argues Coski, who is working on a book about the tortured odyssey of the Confederate flag. "You can make a better case for the importance of slavery to the government and the nation of the Confederacy than you can to the soldiers.

So in the middle of one of the worst budget crises in history, the Peach State legislature is a house divided -- divided over two pieces of cloth from a war that ended 138 years ago.

The new flag is a slight variation on the banner that flew over the statehouse from 1879 to 1956. That flag was championed by state Sen. Herman H. Perry, a colonel in the Confederate Army. Now it is being championed by state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a black man.

Brooks, D-Atlanta, has been pushing for a return to this flag design for 20 years. He says its Confederate inspiration doesn't offend him because Georgia was, after all, a Confederate state.

In a way, Brooks sees in the battle over the Georgia state standard a metaphor for the struggle for -- and against -- Southern identity. If blacks can accept this new banner, it can no longer be said they're simply opposed to anything Confederate. And if whites can't accept it, what becomes of the protestations of "heritage, not hate"?

Republican state Rep. Bobby Franklin voted in 2001 against changing the old flag. But the past two years of wrangling have changed his mind and heart.

"If the true motive of 'heritage advocates' is to honor the South and those who fought for Southern independence, what better symbol than an actual national flag of the Confederacy," Franklin asked in a recent speech. "Let us adopt a flag that, while Southern, is free of racially divisive imagery."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.