was raised to conflagration levels during the 1996 Olympic Games when the host city of Atlanta û and thus the flag of Georgia û was at the center of the worldÆs attention.
One news report from 1993 û as the city of Atlanta was beginning to build its Olympic fields and to craft its public face for the games û summarizes the controversy that continued throughout the games.
Here in the spiritual capital of the New South, a war is raging over the most enduring symbol of the Confederacy û the rebel battle emblem in the state flag.
With pressure intensifying to remove it, youÆd have thought from the yowl that went up from the angry good olÆboys and traditionalist that someone was trying to ban Merle Haggard from the jukebox.
But here the Confederate banner is as sacred as Mom, baseball and pickup trucks. The effort to take it off the flag is being met with massive resistance. Most white Georgians, according to polls, are up in arms over what they see as an assault on their Southern heritage (Harrison A5).
The controversy in Georgia is similar in many ways to the recently resolved issue of South CarolinaÆs flying the Confederate Battle Flag over the state capital. The controversy in Columbia was ended this spring when the state senate voted to end the 38-year stalemate over the Confederate battle flag that flutters above the Statehouse dome exactly 139 years to the day after Confederate forces shelled Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor and ignited the Civil War (Braun 32).
The vote was a compromise of sorts on the issue: the Stars and Bars were removed from its perch beneath the U.S. and state Palmetto flag above the dome and remove similar banners from inside the legislative chambers to a spot outside the Statehouse, behind a memorial for Confederate soldiers.
Senators who had loudly backed the flag's presence for decades conceded that the mounting financial toll of an eight-month boycott led by the National Associ...