Confederate battle flag evokes history, hate: Your Say

Hurley (Va.) High School proudly displays the Confederate battle flag, and its nickname is the Rebels (“ At Hurley High, Confederate battle flag is everywhere and means everything”). Letter to the editor: 

I graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in Baton Rouge in 1962. We were the Lee High Rebels, and my class was the first to graduate from the new school. Life was different back then, but now some 53 years later, I still love being a Rebel. Like the students of Hurley High School in Virginia, being a Rebel meant team spirit, and had no racial overtones.

Beth Pugh Johnson; Counce, Tenn.

Comments from Facebook are edited for clarity and grammar:

Open a history book and look at what the Confederates stood for. They fought for and wanted to keep their slaves. It’s a culture of hate. I wouldn’t be caught dead in that uniform.

— Timothy Jones

Stop it already! It’s a piece of cloth that everyone chooses to interpret differently.

I’m from the North and own a few Confederate flags. We don’t read anything into them, and accept and appreciate them as part of history.

Just because a gunman who allegedly shot up a church in Charleston, S.C., and other ignorant groups use the battle flag as a negative doesn’t mean we need to feed into it!

— Sher Welch-Lambert

People can fly that thing wherever they please, as long as it’s not an institution that receives my tax dollars.

— Mark Paine

It’s not Southern heritage; it’s history — and one that doesn’t warrant too much pride.

— Wayne Leslie