An exhibit at deCordova Park in Lincoln, Mass. recalls the final flag of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, the white flag of surrender. Entitled “Monumental Cloth: The Flag We Should Know”, the installation by Sonya Clark, according to NPR, centers on a thirty foot long, fifteen foot wide:
massive recreation of a flag that history seems to have forgotten. When Gen. Robert E. Lee and his troops surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, a simple white, waffle weave dishcloth with red stripes was exchanged. Known as the flag of truce, that little cloth represented the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, a new era of American history. “When I first encountered the truce flag, I realized I’d never seen the symbol before,” Clark says. “It’s not something that’s in our everyday mind like the Confederate Battle Flag is.”
A long list of different items emblazoned with the Confederate flag march down a wall in “Monumental Cloth.” From yoga mats to tube tops to washcloths, the Confederate flag is a symbol that permeates our visual culture, even outside of the United States. “I’ve seen the Confederate flag in Canada,” says Clark. “I’ve seen it in Brazil, in Italy. It’s a symbol that transcends borders because of what it represents.”
There are some who still argue that the Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern virtue, gentility and independence. But the South couldn’t exist without cotton and cotton couldn’t exist without slave labor. When rebel troops began using the flag as a symbol for their resistance, it also symbolized the white supremacist systems needed to allow the South to endure. The flag became more than just a flag, it was “propaganda,” says Clark. “For propaganda to work, you have to sell the people something. And that something was the illusion of Southern gentility and Southern pride.”
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