I grew up in the very deepest of the Deep South, in the MS Delta, in a house surrounded by cotton and soybean fields, with my direct family line in the local Southern Baptist church going all the way back to the 1870's. I'll be the first in the line not buried there.
In other words, I know very, very well what Southern heritage is - I know it better than most. I grew up honoring my Southern heritage, lived it, and loved it...until I came to understand what it lly was, and what that flag (I owned one) really stood for.
For instance, do you really know why the Confederate flag was flying there at the S.C. capitol? From
The Atlantic:
In 1988, Lee Atwater, the tactician of racial politics in a very different Republican Party, gave me a tour of the State House at Columbia, South Carolina. I was there as a reporter for the Washington Post. Standing in the rotunda under the dome he showed off the monumental statute of John C. Calhoun, godfather of secession, and then pointed out the window to the Confederate flag. It had been flying there since 1962, an emblem of resistance to the civil rights movement.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er,’” Atwater had explained to the political scientist Alexanders Lamis back in 1981. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes …”
It had only been flying there since 1962 - but NOT in the previous 97 years. And why was it raised? As an emblem of resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Have you read Mississippi's Declaration of Secession? Perhaps you should - there's a reason why it's not shown to students there as a part of high school state history.