Confederate flags: Flying for historical freedom or fomenting hate?
05/10/2013
Don Balyeat is going classroom to classroom, club to club in defense of the Confederate flag.
He's not defending the hate. He's defending the history.
It's a challenging labor of love for the 73-year-old Sturgis-area resident, a retired AAA manager and self-made historian on the Civil War. He travels to schools and local history groups clarifying what he considers to be misconceptions about the familiar-and-controversial Confederate battle flag.
It is much more, Balyeat contends, than a symbol of prejudice and racial division, although he admits that it has often been used as such.
"It is not a hate flag. It is a piece of history that cannot be lost," Balyeat said. "Should we hate the flag because it's carried by racist people?"
That question is being debated these days in western South Dakota, far from the traditional battlegrounds of the Confederate flag conflict in states farther south. A dispute over an historical flag display in a building at the VA Medical Center in Hot Springs has turned a formerly distant issue into an up-close topic of debate across the Black Hills region.
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