Activists Burn, ‘De-Zombify’ Confederate Flag In Detroit: Watch

DETROIT, MI — A performance artist who hails from Detroit conducted a “funeral” for the Confederate flag on Memorial Day, burning the embattled emblem in part to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Detroit’s violent 1967 riots but also to stoke a conversation about what is seen by many as a divisive symbol of slavery, racism and white dominance.

John Sims, who now lives in Florida, burned a folded Confederate flag at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, a Midtown museum, and then buried the “cremains” before a jubilant crowd. The museum is near the epicenter of the 1967 riots, what is now Rosa Parks Boulevard and Clairmont Avenue, and Sims’ old neighborhood.

Sims, 49, has burned Confederate flags multiple times in the past 15 years but never in his hometown. The Confederate flag isn’t often seen fluttering in Detroit, but the city is important in any discussion of race relations in America. Detroit was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad, and the city currently has the highest concentration of African-Americans (84 percent, according to the 2010 Census) of any city in the United States. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, click here to find your local Michigan Patch. Also, follow us on Facebook, and if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

“We are de-zombifying the flag,” Sims said before the ceremony, according to a report by Al Jazeera News. “The flag should have died with the soldiers on the battlefield.”

“Amen! Yes!” some of the approximately 70 spectators responded when Sims torched the emblem.

The performance artist said Memorial Day “is a time to think about what the Civil War really means and how the flag, after the war, was co-opted by the Ku Klux Klan and turned into a symbol of terrorism and intimidation.”

“We’re drawing strength from the protest energy of Detroit … and the pride and capacity of its people to speak up and respond actionably,” he said.

The event in Detroit is symbolic of the brewing political storm surrounding the Confederate flag, touched off in 2015 when then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ordered the Confederate flag removed from the state Capitol grounds. Haley was responding to criticism of the flag after Dylann Roof, convicted of killing nine African-Americans at a historic black church in Charleston, was shown in widely circulated pictures as he waved the emblem of the Confederacy.

Other jurisdictions are also confronting the thorny issue. Officials in New Orleans began dismantling Confederate monuments from public spaces in April despite protests, the Times Picayune reported. Similar conversations about the removal of Civil War monuments are taking place in Baltimore and elsewhere across the South.

“For some people it’s the symbol of some kind of pride,” poet Jessica Care Moore, who attended the mock funeral in Detroit, told WJBK-TV. “When you think of what that war was about, it was about keeping us in bondage.”

Sabrina Nelson, who attended the ceremony, told WXYZ-TV that art is a vehicle to affect social change. “If you’re an artist and you’re not talking about what’s happening, you’re not really doing what your call is,” Nelson said.

Not everyone agrees that symbols of the Confederacy should be dismantled, though, and Sims has experienced much of this firsthand with death threats and ridicule.

Ryan Spencer, general manager of The Henry Ford Museum’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, where Civil War re-enactments are held annually, said the Confederate flag is important in an educational context.

“Civil War remembrance comes from a place of mourning, and the country is still trying to come to terms with what happened — the good and the bad,” Spencer told Al Jazeera News. “Difficult history is still history. We can’t just forget.”

Sims agrees the Confederate flag “is a permanent part of American history” but told Al Jazeera News that counter-rituals like the flag burning in Detroit call attention to the racist fervor of some of the flag’s most vocal defenders. He doesn’t use his performance art as a call to arms, he said, but to encourage discourse and provide a soothing balm for African-Americans who fear the symbol and whose ancestors were enslaved under it.

“I hope the fabric of humanity can mend itself,” activist Monica Lewis-Patrick told Al Jazeera News, “so that it makes something far more superior than this flag ever stood for.”

More on Sims’ Burn And Bury project is found here.

Photo by Ty Wright/Getty Images News/Getty Images