Councilman removes Confederate flags from graves
William White | Opelika-Auburn News
Auburn City Councilman Arthur L. Dowdell poses with Confederate flags that he removed from graves at Pine Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Staff writer
Published: April 23, 2009
Updated: April 24, 2009
Mary Norman was shocked Thursday afternoon when Auburn Councilman Arthur L. Dowdell pulled up a Confederate flag placed on her great-grandfather’s grave and snapped it in half, she said.
Dowdell, who denies snapping the flag, said Thursday he was picking up his daughter from Auburn Junior High School near the cemetery when several people told him they “had a problem” with the flags.
He drove to the cemetery and started pulling up flags, he said.
“It’s offensive to me,” he said. “To me, it represents the Ku Klux Klan and racism.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy placed the flags earlier this week, as they have done for 50 years, in preparation for a celebration Sunday of Confederate Memorial Day, Norman said.
Confederate Memorial Day will be celebrated as a state holiday in Alabama Monday.
“I really didn’t know exactly how to respond to him,” she said. “I happen to be a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy. I was very surprised, especially (as he is) a city councilman. I was amazed.”
Norman was not personally involved in placing the flags.
“I’m a historian,” she said. “We’re not about hate, we’re not about anything like that. We just want to honor our state’s rights, and I’ve got Confederate ancestors, and I feel we should have the ability to do that.”
Norman and a friend were taking inventory of graves at Pine Hill Cemetery in Auburn when Dowdell drove up and asked who put up the flags, she said.
“One of the flags had been placed on my great-grandfather’s grave, who was a Confederate soldier,” Norman said. “He just got very upset, and he went over to my great-grandfather’s grave, picked up the flag and broke it in two.”
She said Dowdell did not know the plot she stood on was her family’s. The flags were placed on soldiers’ graves as a mark of respect, she said.
He pulled up Confederate flags from other soldiers’ graves, too, she said.
Dowdell said in his years as councilman, he had never seen so many Confederate flags in one place.
“I’m going on the record that this will never happen again,” Dowdell said. “This will never happen again as long as I’m on the city council.”
Dowdell denied intentionally snapping the flag.
“It might have snapped itself,” he said. “If it did, so what? If I had my way, I would have broke them all up and stomped on them and burned them. That flag represents another country, another nation.”
Auburn Mayor Bill Ham said he was unaware of any incidents at the cemetery but said he talked with Dowdell Thursday afternoon. Ham said his understanding was that all city cemeteries have covenants governing how and what types of decorations can be placed on graves, except for Pine Hill because it is so old. Ham said he believed Dowdell asked an assistant city manager to look into making policies equal for cemeteries across the city.
“The bottom line is those grave plots are deeded property,” Ham said. “We sell those. So they are sold to the family of the individuals, and I think (plot owners) have a right to do exactly what they did, according to the city attorney.”
Ham said in his conversation with Dowdell, the councilman suggested the flags be placed on the graves for a shorter period of time, perhaps for 24 hours before the event.
For now, the remaining flags will stay on the graves because of the lack of covenant governing Pine Hill, Ham said. But that could change in coming years.
“I certainly think we need to be consistent in all the cemeteries with whatever the policy is, not only with this, but with everything,” Ham said. “The council has got to make that decision.”
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Reader Reactions
I invite Councilman Arthur L. Dowdell to come to Asheville,NC , hometown of the Honorable H.K. Edgarton, on May 10, 2009. Confederate Battle Flags will at that time be planted near the gravesites of many of my ancestors. Unlike many Southerns, my family owned slaves before and during the War of Northern Aggression. After the former slaves became Freedmen, they honored my family by taking as their surname “Creasman”, thus, I consider them to be my Black cousins. They, too, will place flags at the appropriate places.
I invited Mr Dowdell to Asheville only to observe the activities and to remove any Battle Flag he sees fit to remove. However, I would request the Councilman to inform his next of kin as to his preferred burial site—Alabama or North Carolina.
Regards,
Mike Creasman
A Klan memeber would carry two thing and both of them are also carried by Dowdell a Cross and a Bible.They got all their beliefs from the Bible and the Cross was teir main symbol!What do you think w=as Burned in yards in the early years?And not just Blacks Had it done in their yards sorry whites that would not support their famliyy and stayed drunk or something and did not show for work got the same .No Confederate Flags were flown in these cases unless the American Flag was with it.
In my own fifty-plus years I have never seen a Confederate flag carried by or associated with the Klan. However, even if every Klansman in the US wore robes and carried Confederate flags daily, it would be a misuse of the flag and a misrepresentation of its designers’ intent. “How did it make you feel?“ is not an excuse, much less a justification, for anyone, much less a public servant, to vandalise private property and desecrate graves to vent his own misguided spleen. Such a man should indeed be in a public building. Not the city hall, but rather the city jail or the public mental wards.
To jebahoula, I tried to post a comment the other day with some of this same info, but for what ever reason it didn’t post. I have not had time to get back to try to rewrite it. I thank you for your post and trying to educate some of these fools. I hope at least one person has enough sense to read your post and see lincoln (I can’t bring myself to capitalize his name) was nothing more than a tyrannical dictator whose actions were driven by the all mighty dollar. Just a little research will make you start to see there was more to lincoln’s agenda than slavery. Slavery didn’t become an issue with lincoln until he needed and excuse for a war that had cost him (the federal government) millions of dollars and thousands of soldiers and civilian lives from both the north and South; hence the Emancipation Proclamation. Incidentally this only freed the slaves in the South, not the north. If the war was fought over slavery why did it not free all slaves. Also why did all the poor men of the South fight a war over slavery when they did not own slaves. Slaves in the South were owned by only five percent of the people. Of this five percent, some slave owners were black. One of the biggest slave merchants was a black man. Even though slaves were in the north, the South gets blamed for enslaving all slaves. These slaves were enslaved by their own people. Warring tribes would capture members from other tribes and sell or trade them to slave merchants who would bring them to the United States to sell. I don’t think anyone today would argue that slavery was not bad. It was bad and until we can stop the people whose paychecks depend on keeping certain groups of people stirred up, we will never be able to get along. We must accept our history for what it was, good and bad, and be allowed to honor our ancestors without fear of reprisal. If we erase Southern History, then we erase a large and very important part of Black history. Southern history is rich in Black history and every Black man, woman and child with ties to the South should be proud to preserve their history, good and bad. Name me one country or race of people whose history is all good. We learn from our mistakes and try to move on. You can’t keep dredging up things from 150 years ago and blaming the people of today for what happened.
Abraham Lincoln declared in his First Inaugural Speech on March 4, 1861:
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
“The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”
Abraham Lincoln said he started the War only to collect taxes and not to interfere with slavery, at all, one month before he invaded Charleston Harbor with 11 armed warships to occupy Fort Sumter, a tax collection fort; therefore, the only possible cause of the War was to collect taxes from Southerners.
Southerners paid over 80% of all Federal taxes, almost all import taxes, and the North received 80% of the tax revenue to subsidize Northern bankers and inefficient Northern industry. That is why it is called a protective tariff. Lincoln promised, if elected, to raise the import tax on Southerners to over 40% from the current 20% and did so in the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861.
Every person in the South, slave or free, who bought an iron frying pan, stove, plough, shovel, boiling pot, musket, etc. would have to pay over 40% import tax, if bought from Europe, or 40% more in price, if bought from Northern manufacturers.
The Southern states were escaping from Lincoln’s oppressive taxes. South Carolina had already threatened to withdraw from the Union in 1828 when Congress passed the “Tariff of Abominations”, which also raised taxes on the Southern people from 20% to 40%, but the North backed down and returned the tax rate to 20%. Lincoln repeated this tax gouging in 1861 and invaded the Southern States only to collect his oppressive tax for his rich industrial supporters in the North, who worked eight year old children 16 hours a day for pennies and made them sleep in the street.
Just informationally, if the federal Veterans Administration cheerfully continues to provide Confederate gravestones for Confederate soldiers, where does a councilman get off inflicting his private agenda on everyone?
The rest of the country long ago said these men were, one way or another, Americans who served as soldiers and were worthy of recognition with a gravestone. It is a different gravestone than that provided Union soldiers, and both differ from those issued for more recent wars. I helped install 53 of them in a cemetery in Chester, SC, more than a decade ago and so far as I know they’re still available. They weigh 257 pounds, incidentally.
That flag was a soldier’s flag, regimental colors, long before it became a flag for bigotry. A little education on its origin and its appropriate use might serve everyone well and start the process of taking it back from the haters.
The whole thing is just unbelievable.
Perhaps the meaning on the police cars to serve and protect means self serving self protecting of all government employees.
When’s the City Council meeting, and where? Will Downdell be out of jail then? Better yet, when will he GO to jail? Lawbreakers are supposed to go to jail, so why isn’t that criminal behind bars?
I for one wish Hal Turner would just leave Auburn out of his show all together. Mr. Turner condones the kind of behavior that makes Mr. Dowdell believe he was right in the first place. We all know that isn’t going to help anything except stir up more hate. Mr. Turner is just as guilty as of using this whole situation as a press opportunity as Arthur Dowdell. Want to voice your displeasure over Dowdell’s actions? Attend the City Council meeting.
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