I'm sorry, but the historical evidence is against you.
In 1861-63, the Confederate flag was the symbol of slavery and rebellion, and flew while 750,000 Americans died.
After the war, it was used for decades as a symbol of violent resistance to the United States.
Then it was used again in the 1940s as the symbol of the segregationist Dixiecrats, a national party with a meteoric rise and fall.
In 1956, the state of Georgia, which was battling segregation, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag. "The 1956 flag was adopted in an era when the Georgia General Assembly "was entirely devoted to passing legislation that would preserve segregation and white supremacy", according to a 2000 research report by the Georgia Senate." (source)
(During this time, the South was naming high schools after and putting up statues to famous Confederates. Can you imagine what it's like for a black person going to a high school named after a Confederate general who fought to keep black people slaves?)
In 1961, South Carolina started to fly the Confederate flag on their Capitol, inaugurated with speeches like this: "that Reconstruction had been “more insidious than war and equally evil in consequences, until the prostrate South staggered to her knees assisted by the original Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts who redeemed the South and restored her to her own.”" (source)
So from 1861 through 1961, the flag had been used more or less continuously as a symbol of slavery and segregation.
But then you believe people almost immediately forgot all about its meaning.
But then a few years later... remembered what it was again, so now it's racist again.
Everyone has always known it was a symbol of the CSA.
If you went to a Skynyrd concert, I'll bet you couldn't have found one person who didn't know it was the CSA flag.
Be honest - do you think even one fan of the band did not know what the symbol meant?
Or could not have explained to you what the Civil War was about, even if they called it the War of Northern Aggression, and claimed it was about states' rights (to own humans as slaves)?
Of course they knew. They just thought it was cool.
As they continue to say, "The South will rise again", and what exactly could that possibly mean other than, "We'll do it again, and this time we'll win"?
