GET A GRIP

A Confederate battle flag appeared on a monitor inside the North Carolina pavilion at the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was part of a privately sponsored video loop. It hurt no one. It threatened no one. It was history on a screen.

The reaction was immediate and predictable. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein demanded its removal. A corporate sponsor severed ties. A historian called it a shame. A political group called it disgusting. The governor's office worked with event organizers to scrub the image from the monitors.

A flag. On a screen. At a fair.

AMERICA, GET A GRIP.

We have arrived at a moment in this country where the mere sight of a historical symbol is treated as an act of violence. Where elected officials rush to a microphone to condemn an image before they have taken a breath. Where corporate sponsors calculate their exit before the outrage is twenty-four hours old. Where a crowd at a state fair cannot be trusted to see a piece of their own history without official intervention.

This is not strength. This is not virtue. This is a conditioned reflex. The modern narrative has trained a generation to perform distress on command. A flag appears. The panic follows. No thought required.

But here is what no one in that panic will say out loud. The narrative driving that reflex does not look anything like the historical record. It does not look anything like what serious scholars were writing fifty years ago. It has been rebuilt, piece by piece, over five decades, until the version being taught in classrooms and enforced by governors and celebrated by corporate press releases bears almost no resemblance to what the primary sources actually say.

That is not organic. That is not scholarship. That is a campaign. And the people on the receiving end of it have a name. They are Confederate Americans. Eighty million of them by conservative estimate. And they have been told, with increasing force and legal consequence, that their history is a crime, their symbols are weapons, and their identity has no place in public life.

THE H.K. EDGERTON EQUAL PROTECTION INITIATIVE.

H.K. Edgerton of Asheville, North Carolina understood something these officials do not. H.K. was a Black man, a former president of the Asheville chapter of the NAACP, and one of the most fearless defenders of Confederate heritage in this country's history. He marched through the South carrying that flag. He stood in front of courthouses and statehouse steps carrying that flag. He did not flinch. He did not panic. He read the documents and he reached his own conclusions.

H.K. knew that the Confederate soldier was not a monster. He knew that the men who fought under that banner were fathers and sons and neighbors, and that their descendants carry that history in their blood. He knew that erasing symbols does not heal anything. It only tells a people that their history does not belong to them.

H.K. passed away in January 2026. Before he died, he lent his name and his legacy to the H.K. Edgerton Equal Protection Initiative.

The EPI makes a straightforward legal argument. Confederate Americans are a national origin group under the Civil Rights Act. They are entitled to the same equal protection every other heritage community in this country enjoys. The First Amendment protects their expression. The Bill of Attainder clause prohibits government punishment of an identity. No legislature has the authority to erase a people.

The argument is not complicated. It is the same argument every protected class in America rests on. We are simply demanding that it apply to us as well.

The EPI is moving. Tennessee state representative Jay Reedy has committed to committee introduction in January 2027. Chadwick White, candidate for Tennessee House District 92, has committed to sponsoring the legislation if elected, and carries the SIA endorsement. At the federal level, Oklahoma congressional candidate Mark Tedford has committed to sponsoring the EPI and earned the first congressional endorsement in SIA history.

Two states. Two levels of government. A growing coalition of legislators who have read the documents and reached their own conclusions.

SERIOUSLY, GET A GRIP.

What happened at the Freedom 250 fair is exactly why the EPI exists. An image appears. A governor acts as enforcer. A corporation signals its values by cutting a check. And somewhere in North Carolina, a family with Confederate ancestors watches their history get scrubbed from a screen at a fair on the National Mall, in the city named for a man who owned slaves, surrounded by monuments to men who did the same.

The difference is that their history is celebrated. Ours is prosecuted.

That is not unity. That is not healing. That is a people being told they do not exist.

H.K. Edgerton walked through it without flinching. The EPI was built to fight it through the law.

Don't take my word for it. Read the documents.

By Mindy Esposito / June 28, 2026 / Nashville, Tennessee

Mindy Esposito is the founding director of the Southern Independence Association and the creator of the H.K. Edgerton Equal Protection Initiative.