It appears the Confederate battle flag’s days are numbered.

The flag was never revered everywhere, but along with “Dixie,” it symbolized for Southerners---make that white Southerners---a home, history, and heritage we were proud of.

As a boy growing up in Kentucky---a state that wasn’t even part of the Confederacy---I played war games with other neighborhood boys using toy wooden rifles. “The war” was never named, but it didn’t need to be. Everyone knew which war it was, who the good guys were, and the bad guys were. Since we all wanted to be Rebels, we roamed the neighborhood as a single unit, aiming our rifles at imaginary Union troops lurking behind the shrubbery and in our parents’ garages. Sometimes we carried the Confederate flag.

Later, as an adult, I bought a club tie with the Confederate flag on it and wore it to social events. No one seemed to think it out of line. But as I grew older, I began to feel differently about the flag and that tie has hung unworn in my closet for the past 20 years. How could I not have realized that while the Stars and Bars may have symbolized honor and freedom to me, it symbolized dishonor and slavery to so many others? I’m embarrassed today that it took me so long to see that.

When it became known that the murderer of nine black Christians at a prayer meeting in Charleston two weeks ago wore clothing bearing the flag and celebrated it as a symbol of his hateful racism, the flag instantly became a regional embarrassment. It’s hard to imagine that a man would wear a necktie with the Confederate flag on it today (actually, it’s hard to imagine a man wearing any necktie today, but that’s another topic).

The Confederate flag is incorporated in the Mississippi state flag, and the speaker of the Mississippi house has called for the state flag to be redesigned. Governor Bentley has removed four confederate flags from the Alabama statehouse grounds. Several southern states will stop issuing vanity license plates with the Confederate flag. Walmart, Sears, Amazon, and e-bay have all stopped selling merchandise bearing the flag. There are even calls for the removal of statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Nathan Bedford Forrest around the South. All that within the past two weeks.

But the Confederate flag still flies on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse and only an act of the state legislature can remove it. Following the murders, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, carefully hedging her bets, said that conversation about the flag “will probably come back up again,” but five days later, after noting how the wind was blowing, she called for the flag’s removal. South Carolina legislators of both parties agreed and the flag will almost certainly come down as soon as the legislature can convene.

All that is fine and overdue, but not much good comes from taking down flags if that’s all we do. It’s just a symbolic gesture, and while symbols have power, if the symbols don’t stand for realities on the ground, they’re meaningless.

We still have a long way to go before we attain “liberty and justice for all,” in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag.

Our way of funding education tends to underfund schools in predominantly black neighborhoods, so black students are less likely to have access to advanced courses. Voter ID laws make it difficult for many black people to vote. We send huge numbers of black men to prison, often for non-violent crimes, removing the breadwinner and dismembering black families. In many areas, black men are routinely stopped by police officers for the flimsiest of reasons.

Some of the problems of black Americans cannot be changed by law---poverty, rampant drug use, and the high rate of out-of-wedlock births come to mind. But even those problems could be better managed with laws and programs designed to assure liberty and justice for all.

So good-bye to the Confederate flag. Now what else are we going to do?

Richard H. Schmidt is a retired Episcopal priest, editor and author who lives in Fairhope. He can be reached at courier@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.