Letter From South Carolina

Shortly after Strom Thurmond died, the flags at the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia were lowered to half-staff. Every flag except one, that is. There on the northern grounds below the Capitol steps, facing Main Street, the Confederate flag waved high. On that late-June evening, the flag served as a visible, and shameful, reminder: Racial politics in the South would long outlive their most resilient practitioner.

Thurmond's death marked the end of an era, in that he was one of the South's last living political links to the days of colored water fountains and segregated lunch counters. But even as that era is passing into history, history itself is becoming a battleground, demonstrating once again the truth of William Faulkner's famous line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

On one side is the version of history promoted by conservative whites, who venerate the brave Confederate soldiers and their gallant generals. On the other side are blacks and the beleaguered, shrinking ranks of liberal whites, who prefer to speak about slavery as the horror it was. Now, a pair of major museum projects--one an unvarnished memorial to the realities of slavery, the other a celebration of the Confederacy--are about to make permanent the segregation of the region's history. Both will be located in or near Charleston, the heart of the antebellum South, where the Civil War started.

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