When The Flag's Under Attack Look For H.K. Edgerton
By Deborah Fitts
October 2004

GETTYSBURG, Pa. - In a society fond of sorting people according to type, a black man defending the Confederate flag defies any kind of stereotyping.

Meet H.K. Edgerton, 56, who made the most prominent statement opposing the Confederate flag exhibit at Gettysburg College when he walked 23 miles from Chambersburg to Gettysburg wearing a Confederate uniform and carrying a Confederate flag.

"Anytime there's something like this - an attack on our Southern heritage - you'll probably find me there," he says.

The Civil War News caught up with Edgerton at a motel on Baltimore Street, resting up from the two-day hike into town. The walk was timed to precede two evenings of vigils protesting the exhibit.

A native of Asheville, N.C., and past president of the Asheville NAACP, for the last few years Edgerton has made a career of advocating for Southern heritage and Confederate history. When youngsters (he calls them "my babies") are told by school administrators that they can't wear a T-shirt with a Confederate flag (he prefers to call it "the Christian cross of St. Andrew"), or employees are told they can't display the flag in the workplace, Edgerton is likely to show up.

In 2002-03 he and his brother walked 1,606 miles from Asheville to Austin, Texas, with the flag. On their walk they raised awareness and money for the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), of which Edgerton is an honorary member, and for the Southern Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit in Black Mountain, N.C., which uses legal remedies to fight what they call "the current politically correct reign of terror against the Confederate community."

The March Across Dixie "was something nobody else had ever done," Edgerton says - "a black man in a Confederate uniform. There were black folks posing with me and my flag. It resonated all across the South: this is our Southland too."

Edgerton is passionate about honoring those who fought for the Confederacy, black and white, including African-Americans "who went off to war with their masters" and served as cooks or farriers, or even took up arms. "There was a love that existed between black and white in the South that transcended the bonds of slavery," he maintains. "We were family."

Division between the races was promoted by hate groups like the KKK, Edgerton says, but he believes the NAACP itself has consciously fanned the flames by attacking Confederate symbols. He asserts that Martin Luther King Jr. realized, "You couldn't sit down with the sons of slaves and the sons of slave owners and attack the Cross of St. Andrew."

As for John Sims, the black artist who created the Confederate flag exhibit, Edgerton is dismissive. "He was offended because he was told to be offended," he says.

If he could speak to Sims, Edgerton says he would tell him, "If you want the healing process in America, this thing you're doing is wrong. It's the worst statement of hatred I've ever seen. You don't understand what that flag means to Southern people."

As for Gettysburg College, he says, "You can't be an institution of higher education and be too stupid to understand the healing process."

Edgerton realizes that his quixotic, one-man campaign can't move mountains. "I can't help what's been inculcated in the thought processes of people," he says.

But armed with an infectious passion that is laced with warmth and humor, he hopes to "create dialogue, and start people thinking about this."

"Confederate history is the reference point for me. If I run from that, I'm living a lie."