Evocations and Provocations: States of Mind on Flags

Abstract

A recent drive from Atlanta to a high school reunion in Danville, Virginia, prompted thoughts of its history in light of the storms over the Confederate flag which have swirled around South Carolina and now brew, with less intensity, in Georgia. Danville was home until departure for college in Atlanta, never to be hometown again. Thoughts arose about the reputation it had earned during the Civil Rights Movement. From the vantage point of maturity, latter-day thoughts of Ole Virginny have caused some consternation about myopia in younger eyes. The minor turbulence that beset that town was nothing compared to events at the seat of the Movement, Atlanta, adopted as hometown upon marriage there in 1960. Vistas for a new perspective of Danville came from much farther, freshly aroused by thoughts of the year 1959-1960, spent in England on a study-abroad scholarship. Ironically, an acquaintance, while attending Exeter University for a full year after a summer program at London University, with two white females from Averett College in Danville presented the stark canker of segregation: the only African-American (not our nomenclature then) student at the university, and one of a small group of Americans, takes classes with students with whom she could not in Virginia. Thus in 2000, the irony is compounded by the significance of the venue for the reunion of students from the one black high school in town: the new field house at Averett, on its satellite campus. That high school had been converted into a middle school with the advent of integration in 1967.