5 Hot New Designs for the Confederate Flag
LatestAs South Carolina moves to take down the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the statehouse, the national debate surrounding the flag grows to a new height. Among all of the impassioned arguments for and against removing this contentious symbol from the public space, it is strange that lawmakers and the public they serve have yet to consider a simple compromise: Let’s just redesign the Confederate flag!
As a pair of marketing consultants, it is painfully obvious to us that the rebel flag is a cluttered and ineffective brand. Whatever your cause—armed insurrection, white supremacy, regional pride—the flag’s minimalist stars and bars leave so much to the imagination that it is no wonder we are plagued with conflicting interpretations of its meaning. Perhaps we could end the debate once and for all by mustering the courage and creativity to give the old flag a new design that more honestly matches the reason it was created and the way it has been used throughout history.
Prepared on spec, here are five redesigns that demonstrate the power of honesty in advertising.
Flag 1:
Here we’ve adapted the popular “southern cross” motif to more explicitly celebrate the South’s commitment to the States’ basic right to own human beings as property. For a more historical touch, we considered using this excerpt from the Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession:
“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”
But as a slogan, that’s a little too long. And not particularly sexy.
Flag 2:
Great brands keep it real. As immortalized in DW Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, the Reconstruction Era presented southern whites with a whole new way of keeping it real: lynching. A way of murdering approximately 4,659 blacks between 1877 to 1950, lynching—held in the backwoods and in the public square alike—was part of a nationwide rebrand of the region, in which the the brutal killing and dismembering of Negroes became one of the hottest ways to display one’s Southern pride. There’s a reason the Dixiecrats of the 1940’s (a group created to oppose Truman’s integration efforts and anti-lynching laws) adopted the Confederate flag as their symbol. It’s why the Ku Klux Klan embrace the flag as an invaluable part of “white culture,” and the reason hanging black bodies became White Supremacy’s first viral ad campaign. The right symbol is worth 1000 words.