IS REJECTING FLAG SALUTE INCLUSIVE?
Sunday, January 20, 2002
By MARK HOLMBERG (mholmberg@timesdispatch.com)
Richmond Times-Dispatch ColumnistHow will Virginia treat Cassye Bonner Gravely now that she's being sized up for cultural sanitation by a handful of complainants wearing offense-magnifying glasses?
Gravely - a poet, historian, mother and longtime Sunday school teacher - died at 93 more than a quarter-century ago.
At the tender age of 79, she saw her beloved "Salute to the Flag of Virginia" adopted unanimously - but with little fanfare - as the official state flag salute by the Virginia Legislature in 1954.
"I salute the flag of Virginia, with reverence and patriotic devotion to the 'Mother of States and Statesmen' which it represents - the 'Old Dominion,' where liberty and independence were born."
Succinct. Rhythmic. Accurate.
Few modern Virginians used it, or even knew it existed, until the House of Delegates dusted it off a week-and-a-half ago and decided, on a voice vote, to include it in its daily session-opening ritual. That ritual also includes a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Then The Times-Dispatch reported that Gravely was a longtime member and historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a storied organization for women who are either lineal or collateral descendants of Confederate veterans.
Voilà! Instant tempest in a teapot.
"The author does matter," said Del. Dwight Clinton Jones, D-Richmond, one of the handful of legislators protesting the salute. "The origin is important."
Del. Viola O. Baskerville, D-Richmond, among others, is troubled that the General Assembly adopted the flag salute in 1954, two months before the Supreme Court struck down school segregation. The Supreme Court decision triggered Massive Resistance in Virginia.
Jones is also offended by the state being referred to as the "Old Dominion" - he prefers "New Dominion" - even though the nickname dates to 1660 and Charles II. (By the way, the state's predominantly black lawyers association is called the Old Dominion Bar Association.)
Insiders say most of the rest of the delegates want the salute flap to be furled so they can get down to business. But they also don't want to offend the sensibilities of the Legislative Black Caucus, which said it plans to offer a substitute salute this week. (That shouldn't be any more difficult to adopt than a new state song.)
King Salim Khalfani, executive director of the Virginia State Conference NAACP, said the words in the salute aren't the problem - "the origin is the problem."
That attitude distresses Sam Lougheed, president of Virginia's UDC. She's weary of those who "who hear the word 'Confederacy' and think racist group.
"It only had good intentions," she said of the salute. "This dear, sweet lady's heart- felt words are being torn apart."
Gravely, born in Henry County in 1874, was the daughter of a plug tobacco merchant and spent her early years in a three-room log cabin.
Her father did not own slaves, but her grandfather likely did, said great-nephew Desmond Kendrick, the archivist for Henry County.
Her fascination with U.S., Virginia and family history led her to compile her first scrapbook archive at age 12. She would eventually fill 60, Kendrick said.
She married Thomas Elaenor Gravely and served as bookkeeper in their Martinsville hardware store. The couple had two sons and five daughters, but the two boys died as youngsters, one at 6 months and the other at 6 years old.
Gravely compiled history and wrote poems for most of her life. The Civil War battled the Revolutionary War and the two World Wars for her attention.
Reportedly, one of her most cherished records was a chronicle of the men from Martinsville and Henry County who fought during WWII, which another author incorporated in the book, "Gold Star Honor Roll of Virginia in the Second World War."
Gravely was considered an authority on Martinsville and Henry County history and was a "pillar of the community," local historian Carl de Hart told the Roanoke Times newspaper last week.
But she was also a supporter of state's rights, said Kendrick, president of the Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society. One of the treatises that earned her a UDC trophy was titled, "John C. Calhoun, Apostle of State's Rights."
She was a charter member of Virginia's Mildred Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy when it was formed in western Virginia in 1896. She was even elected as an honorary president of the UDC's Virginia Division in 1945.
One of her crowning achievements was the state flag salute, which she penned in a canvas-backed notebook that Kendrick keeps in a safe-deposit box.
"At least now, after 34 years, she is getting a little credit," Kendrick said. "I only hope that it is not stomped in the ground for something that it was not meant to be. . . . The pledge has nothing to do with racism. She loved history, she loved Virginia, she loved her family."
Lougheed said she has grown tired of native Virginians being asked to forsake their relatives. "Many of us have Confederate ancestors. It's a fact of life. . . . How can we not love them?"
She wonders whether the modern practice of rejecting anything from the politically incorrect past would apply if a Confederate descendant came up with a cure for cancer or AIDS.
But, for now, the choice to reject the past is easier. It's only a salute, written by an old woman who's not here to defend herself from those who believe her words are tainted because they come "from an organization and time that," in Khalfani's words, "was unacceptable and noninclusive."
But just how inclusive will modern Virginia be if Cassye Gravely gets the boot?