Students' flag request was 'emotional' but courageous

On Monday, the flagship state university in Mississippi took down its state flag. After the students voted to request the change, Gov. Phil Bryant said that “college students react a lot emotionally.” Students certainly were emotional, but virtuously so.

Plato differentiated the intellectual from the spirited parts of the soul. He prized intellect above all, yet knew that only a spirited team wins the game. He acknowledged that spirit is vital, but that it needs guidance from the other virtues: wisdom, moderation and justice. Spirit properly guided is courage, as opposed to cowardice or brashness.

For Plato, courage is not a lack of fear, but fearing the right things and not the wrong things. It is emotional. Thus, the question about students’ spirited advocacy for taking down the flag is whether it was brash or cowardly.

Had the students been brash, they might have committed vandalism, ripping the flag down. They might have had students reject deliberation or disregard thoughtful leadership. Instead, driven students met with university administration. They sought support from the student body leadership. They organized a discussion forum in late September, inviting expert panelists and then opening up dialogue for comments, questions and challenges.

Courageous student leaders’ next steps were clear. They drafted and debated a bill to call the university to take down the flag. They held a long meeting with countless speakers, in which time was extended over and over for discussion. Senators made their various cases for or against taking down the flag. Some stood up to explain why and how they had been won over in favor of the bill. The ultimate vote came to a two-thirds majority of the 49 senators.

To call the students brash, emotionally speaking, would be grossly unfair.

The next question is whether the students acted cowardly, perhaps valuing the wrong things and not the right things. To that question, we must consider what is at stake.

On the one hand, there are people who value the flag and do not want Confederate symbols to be moved to museums. They are concerned about traditions, but had little to show about what negative effects might come from change. The one serious, concrete claim about a potential consequence predicted that donors to the university would stop giving as a result of diminished Southern symbolism.

Over the last 20 years, however, the Confederate Battle Flag has disappeared from the university’s football stadium. The mascot reminiscent of a plantation owner has been replaced with a bear. The playing of "Dixie," at the conclusion of which people yelled “The South will rise again!” has stopped. With all of these changes, fundraising has done the reverse of the predicted decline, reaching unprecedented heights.

The key with regard to fearing the right things and not the wrong things — to being courageous — is not to mistake all tradition for virtue. Violence against women is traditional, too. Nooses are traditional to communities that committed lynching. Tradition can be wonderfully valuable and important to prize, but it can also be grossly misguided and immoral.

Students and others fear the preservation and promotion of the wrong values. A slew of concrete examples help demonstrate the point.

In 2012, a few tragically misguided young people committed the horrifying, racially motivated murder of James Craig Anderson. They sadly accepted and acted upon a culture of hatred and division that does not represent the best of Mississippi, nor the majority of its youth. The murderers had a history of driving to “Jafrica,” a racist name for Jackson, to shoot metal ball bearings from sling shots at black people.

Shortly after the murder, the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs refused to marry a black couple who had been members for nearly a year. The un-Christian bigotry caught newspapers’ attention as far away as London.

Later in 2012, racial slurs were hurled on campus at the university after President Obama’s reelection. Then, in 2014, university students hung a noose and draped the old Georgia state flag, two-thirds of which feature the Confederate Battle Flag, on the statue of James Meredith, who integrated this university.

There is an undeniable bond between the Mississippi state flag and the meanings and aims of the Confederacy, which the state joined explicitly for the defense of slavery.

The most unimaginable moment for the country was the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina, this year. Nine people who had welcomed a young man into communion with them were slaughtered in their house of worship. Dylan Roof was proud of his Confederate Battle Flag, as we have seen in photographs.

Of all states in the nation, South Carolina has been one of the proudest to fly that flag over its public spaces. In an instant, its  state leadership was confronted with what that means. They took it down.

In Alabama, state leadership realized the contradiction in flying the Confederate Battle Flags while denying that they were stuck in 1962. The flags have come down.

In Mississippi, we have embedded the Confederate Battle Flag so thoroughly into our culture that its emblem is actually stitched into the fabric of our state flag. Therefore, for students to demand unity in a divisive culture, they had to call for taking down the state flag.

Young people are our greatest cause for optimism about Mississippi’s future. They are indeed emotional, spirited, but guided by fear of the right things and not the wrong ones.

Students are unafraid of the taunts of extremists like the Klan or the League of the South. When you remove a long-standing moral splinter, furthermore, unpleasantness oozes out with it. This is to be expected. Counterintuitively, the Klan’s protests are a sign that unity is growing.

Progressive journalist Bill Minor kindly reviewed my recent book, "Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South," finding excessive optimism in it. It would be harder for people not surrounded by courageous and good-spirited young people to feel the optimism that they have inspired in me. Progress will not happen easily or quickly, but the next generation of leaders offers one of the best reasons for hope.

There is no greater challenge or aspiration for Mississippi than the goal of uniting the people of this state, yet students have shown the courage necessary to pursue that aim. Unity is a grand ambition, but it is the right one. It explains why changes to our divisive cultural symbols are of profound importance, even while they are in fact little actions that cost us nothing. The gains that such changes can enable, however, are immeasurable.

Young people have offered the great leadership that their elders have yet to demonstrate. It is time that our public officials fear the right things and not the wrong things too, which is a matter not merely of emotion, but of courage.

Eric Thomas Weber, Ph.D., is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of "Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South" (2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow @EricTWeber on Twitter.