Taking Down the Confederate Flag Is Not Woke

By John M. Sandy

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

There are some things history makes difficult to sentimentalize.

 

Frederick Douglass was a child when he learned what slavery meant. The lesson came through a closet door. Douglass remembered that his Aunt Hester was beautiful, strikingly so. She was, he wrote, “a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance.” She also had an admirer, a young man named Ned Roberts. Douglass remembered Ned as “quite a good-looking young man.”

 

Captain Anthony, the slaves’ master, did not like it.

 

He ordered Hester not to go out at night and warned her never to let him find her with Ned. “Had he been a man of pure morals himself,” Douglass wrote, “he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him will not suspect him of any such virtue.” Anthony owned Hester. But there was one thing his ownership could not command: who she desired.

 

One night, he found her with Ned. Anthony took Hester into the kitchen. He stripped her from the neck to the waist. He bound her hands and fastened them above her head. Then he rolled up his sleeves.

 

“I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” he said. He began to whip her.

 

“The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped,” Douglass remembered, “and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.” Soon “the warm, red blood” was dripping to the floor.

 

Douglass hid in a closet.

 

“I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight,” he wrote, “that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next.”

 

The law recognized Anthony’s claim to her body while recognizing no corresponding claim by Hester to herself. Anthony could dictate where she went, whom she saw, and what happened when she disobeyed. Ned could court her, perhaps. Hester could choose him, perhaps. But neither could make her free.

 

***

 

There is a temptation, when Americans argue about the Confederate flag, to begin with politics. We begin with “wokeness.” We begin with statues and statehouses, heritage and cancel culture. Before long, people are arguing about what someone displaying the flag today intends it to mean. One side sees racism. Another sees ancestry, rebellion, regional identity, or the courage of soldiers who fought beneath it.

 

I think we should begin in the closet.

 

What happened in that kitchen is inseparable from what the Confederacy later chose to defend. The Confederacy did not invent slavery. Neither, for that matter, did the American South. Slavery stained much of the early history of this country. It existed under the American flag. Northern merchants profited from it. Our Constitution accommodated it. Americans inherited a terrible contradiction between the self-evident truth announced in the Declaration of Independence and the human bondage practiced beneath it. And that history belongs to all of us.

 

In 1861, the contradiction finally tore the country apart. And the men who formed the Confederacy were not coy about the institution they meant to protect. Mississippi’s declaration of secession announced that its position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” South Carolina complained that Northern states had “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and wrongfully resisted the return of people who escaped bondage. The Confederate Constitution went further. It prohibited its government from passing any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” It protected the ability of slaveholders to travel with enslaved people and retain their claimed property rights in them. And in Confederate territories it commanded that slavery “shall be recognized and protected.”

 

Those are not the words of modern granola activists imposing their woke fashionable morality. They are the Confederacy’s words. Which is why I have trouble with the claim that removing the Confederate flag from places of public honor is somehow “woke.”

 

There was nothing woke about Frederick Douglass. There was nothing politically fashionable about a formerly enslaved man standing before 19^th-century America and forcing it to confront its principles and practices. Douglass did not need a modern theory of oppression to understand what slavery was. He had crouched in the closet. He had heard the screams. He had seen the blood.

 

This does not mean we should erase the Confederate flag from history. Quite the opposite. Preserve it. Put it in museums. Display it on battlefields where Confederate soldiers carried it. Teach children what it was and why men fought beneath it. Read the secession declarations. Read the Confederate Constitution. Read the letters of soldiers, including those whose motives were more complicated than the motives of the government for which they fought. History should not be cleaned up for our comfort.

 

But neither should history be confused with honor. I contend that a museum preserves and a history book teaches. But a government building and state flag honors. That is an important distinction. We do not erase history when we decide that a symbol no longer deserves a place of civic reverence. We make judgments about our history constantly. Every monument, portrait, flag, and name placed in a courthouse, capitol, or public square reflects a choice about what part of our inheritance we wish to hold up. The Confederate flag should be remembered and studied. But it need not be honored.

 

I understand that many people who display it today do not intend to celebrate slavery. Symbols can acquire meanings beyond their origins. For some, the Confederate flag may call to mind a grandfather, a battlefield, Southern identity, defiance of authority, or simply home. We do no service to one another by assuming the worst motive in every person who sees a symbol differently than we do.

 

But private intention cannot rewrite public history. The question is not simply what the flag means to us now. We should also ask what political order it represented then. And when we do, Frederick Douglass deserves a place in the conversation. Because the power Anthony exercised over Hester was the power of one human being to own another. And when the nation finally fractured over the future of that system, the Confederacy placed the protection of slave property into its fundamental law.

 

Perhaps that is what bothers me most about calling opposition to the Confederate flag “woke.” The word allows us to dismiss an old moral question as though it were a new political fad. It turns something Americans have wrestled with for generations into another skirmish in today’s culture war. Douglass takes us back to a time before our vocabulary became so convenient. Back through the arguments about monuments and flags. Back through Reconstruction and emancipation. Back before Gettysburg and Antietam and Fort Sumter. Back before there was a Confederacy at all.

 

Back to a kitchen, where blood drips onto the floor and a little boy hides in a closet, terrified that he will be next.

 

The Confederacy chose to preserve that world. We should preserve the flag that represents that history too. Preserve it behind glass and in books so that our children can see it and ask what happened here. But preservation is not veneration. And declining to honor that flag is not woke. It is remembering.