On October 13th I started getting messages asking if I’d heard about a tennis club being suspended.
I had not.
The University of Maryland’s club tennis team sent a Google doc out to the other teams before a tournament. Schedules, a campus map, that sort of thing. Somewhere in it was an illustration of mine. I made it almost ten years ago.
Howard University’s team saw it, posted about it on Instagram, and took it to the Maryland administration. Maryland suspended its club tennis team indefinitely. Reporters started calling that afternoon and I did interviews all week.
Some of you have been reading me long enough to remember the first time this happened. A lot of people turning up this week weren’t here for it. So here is where that illustration came from.
The article
In 2017 I was living in Baltimore and I could not get over the Maryland state flag.
I’d never seen that much pride in a state flag anywhere. It’s on houses, on cars, on crab shacks. People get it tattooed on them. Black Marylanders wear it as much as white Marylanders do.
What most of them don’t know is that half of it is Confederate.
That July, April Reign, the media critic who started #OscarsSoWhite, launched #NOconfederate against an HBO series that imagined the South winning the Civil War and keeping slavery. I couldn’t afford HBO. So the day after her campaign ran, I wrote a Twitter thread about the Maryland flag instead. In October I turned it into a full article.
That’s the flag. Before 1880, Maryland didn’t have one.
Maryland stayed in the Union, though there was heavy Confederate support in parts of it. The first casualties of the war were in Baltimore. The Union Army of Maryland flew the black and gold, which is the heraldic banner of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore. Baltimore City still uses that design as its own flag.
Secessionist Marylanders, a lot of whom fought under Robert E. Lee, the general who commanded the Confederate army, took the red and white Crossland banner as theirs. It got so widespread that a law was passed forbidding people from displaying those colours. If you got caught wearing them you were arrested for treason.
Fifteen years after the war, at a parade for Baltimore’s 150th, the state put the two halves together into one flag as a gesture of reconciliation between North and South. It became the official state flag in 1904.
Black Marylanders, who the war was fought over and who the Confederacy affected most, were never asked.
Why I drew it that way
For the top of the article I took the Crossland quarters out and put two figures in Ku Klux Klan hoods in their place.
That was the point. People look at the Maryland flag and don’t see a Confederate flag, because there’s no stars and bars on it. I wanted to make them look.
What happened in 2017
CBS Baltimore ran a story without talking to me or to April. Christina Tkacik at the Baltimore Sun talked to both of us. Debra Alfarone at WUSA9 did a video interview that went out on the DC evening news. Breitbart called it an attack by leftists.
Then Red Maryland, a right wing group, started a petition called “Save Maryland’s Flag,” saying the flag was under attack.
Governor Hogan had just taken the Roger B. Taney statue out of the State House in the middle of the night. Taney was the Chief Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision in 1857, the ruling that said Black people could not be citizens and had no rights a white man was bound to respect. He was a Marylander, and his statue sat outside the State House until Hogan had it hauled off in the dark. That had the far right in the state furious with him. He posted his support for the petition and linked to it.
All of that to save the flag. From me, apparently.
I have never once called for the Maryland flag to be changed. Not then, not now.
This month
Somebody took the illustration out of the article and put it in a document about tennis matches. Somebody chose it. Out of the article it is just a Maryland flag with Klan hoods on it, and that is what the Howard players opened.
I messaged Howard’s tennis club on Instagram to tell them I was sick about how it had been used. They wrote back and said mine was the first apology they’d gotten from anybody.
I don’t buy that it got there by accident. Before all this, the only way that image came up in a search was if you searched for “racist Maryland flag.”
Reporters kept asking me how I felt about it. What I kept telling them is that the students this was done to are the ones who should be centred in this, and that I am not the person to ask. Howard University News Service and The Diamondback both covered it properly.
Dr. Jeanette Snider and Dr. Rashawn Ray called me from the Bowie State and University of Maryland Social Justice Alliance. It’s a partnership between the two schools and the 2nd Lt. Richard W. Collins III Foundation.
Collins was murdered on the University of Maryland campus in an act of racial hatred in May of 2017, a few months before I made the illustration. It tore through the state. I was in Baltimore for it, the same way I’d been in the streets there for years before and have been since.
On Wednesday I sat down with students from Maryland and Howard and Maryland’s NAACP chapter, to talk about how the illustration got made and what white people who want to help with this are actually good for.
What I told them is that they get to paint, in whatever colours they want, how history remembers this moment.
What it’s like
This is work I believe in and it is not fun to do.
In 2017 I got hate mail for weeks. I got it again this month. Most of it came through comments online. These two came in minutes apart under different fake names.
That’s the mild end of it. I’ve been targeted before for calling the Maryland flag what it is, and I knew that would start up again the moment the illustration resurfaced.
What I actually want
People look at my illustration and recoil. Good. That’s what it’s for.
What I want is for people to have that same reaction to the regular Maryland flag. Not my version. The real one, the one on the tattoos and the crab shacks and the State House. What I drew is what the thing already represents. People are bothered by the hoods and not by the flag. Those are the same thing.
Whether that flag changes is not my call, and it never was. Black Marylanders are the ones who should decide whether they want Confederate symbols on the flag that represents them. They weren’t asked in 1880 and they haven’t been asked since.
Benjamin
A note, since it’s been a while.
Since August I’ve been working full time for the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach. Design, photography archiving, language documentation, community communications.
I write about it every month on Patreon. Long posts with a lot of pictures. The drive north, the train, a men’s gathering out on the land, the artifacts that came home from the museum.
