Even if your claim is accurate, and you have not yet supported it with actual historical evidence, can't you understand that you are feeding the flames of racism by judging a symbol by its least common denominator? Let's just say you're correct and that some powerful white leaders were making a statement. If so - they are still among the few who feel/felt that way.
Sure I have - that flag was raised in 1961, and it's not a coincidence that the raising of a Confederate battle flag occurred during a bitter battle over civil rights for blacks. You have to be willfully ignorant to conclude that the events are mere coincidences, and especially given the fact that the same flag was adopted by other states and by white racists opposing civil rights and fighting to maintain white supremacy. Those events are all related, part of the history of that flag.
The alternative explanation is the flag was raised to honor the Southern heritage or some such nonsense, and that might fly if the Confederate battle flag was raised to commemorate some event and then removed after a week, a month, even a year, but it stayed for DECADES, an historical artifact, flying over the State's Capitol.
And we have to assume that the white leaders who raised that flag had the support of 'the [white] people' in those states, because they elected white leaders who defended white supremacy and Jim Crow for DECADES. You're asking me to believe that gutless politicians who have always pandered to voters were somehow acting contrary to the will of the majority of their constituents, and there is simply NO evidence that is the case.
Right now, you are playing into the hands of racists everywhere. And, in doing so, you're creating a false story. You're not acknowledging anything I've told you about what that flag means to descendants of the soldiers in the Civil War, white or black. You're not acknowledging how the flag has come to represent survival and the rebuilding of the South.
I can acknowledge what that flag might mean to some people all day long and it won't change the fact that it was a mostly obscure flag until the civil rights battles started, and that the leaders of the movement against civil rights for their black residents raised that flag as their symbol of protest. That some might honor their dead relatives with it doesn't change that in 2015 that flag has been adopted as a symbol for white supremacists, same as it was the symbol for white supremacists occupying the highest state offices in the 1950s and 1960s.
Think of this - consider the swastika, since we've been talking about it. What if, instead of shunning it - the Native Americans took back their ancient symbol of well being and friendship and printed it on everything they could. Eventually, the sight of the symbol would come to mean just that - and Hitler's bastardization of the it would fade. But, that didn't happen. Instead, out of a misdirected desire to put Hitler in his place, we've elevated the symbol to one of only hate and in doing so - every neo-nazi and antisemitic group has adopted it.
OK, accepting your premise, then as this transformation of the symbol takes place, would you suggest that white, blue eyed, blonde Germans raise the flag and then ask Jewish residents to accept that when THEY raise the flag on the State Capitol, it means peace? Come one. Those Jewish residents would have known friends or family members slaughtered, millions of them in total, under that banner. No one with the slightest respect for Jews and the pain of that recent history would fly that flag and expect them to understand that it no longer means hate and a desire to wipe them off the face of the earth, but peace and love.
And remember that you'd be asking Jews to ignore that white, blue eyed blonde Germans raised that Nazi banner in 1961 while fighting to keep Jews as second class citizens BY LAW, prohibited from attending state colleges, segregated in inferior schools, unable to eat in the same restaurants as Christians, or sit in the same movie seats, Jews only allowed in the back rows of buses, and unable to vote and exercise their rights as Americans, etc. and kept that Nazi banner on the state house continually for another 37 years and only removed it under protest from the Jewish community.
Seriously, I can't believe you believe your own rhetoric. Please, put yourself in the shoes of Jews and ask yourself if you'd buy that nonsense....
As I said - you're going to win this one.
But, once again, we will have lost much.
What will we have lost? A symbol of a racist past? Good riddance.