Giant Confederate Flag Going Up in Richmond

Oh, this will end well. A group in Virginia has bought a plot of land by I-95 in Richmond, where it plans to install a 10-by-15-foot Confederate flag atop a 50-foot pole next week, Raw Story reports. "The flag will serve to welcome visitors and commuters to Richmond, and remind them of our honorable Confederate history and heritage," writes a member of the Virginia Flaggers on a site called Free North Carolina. The project will cost just under $3,000, thanks to volunteers and "an excellent deal on a pole," writes group founder Susan Hathaway.

The local NAACP is less than impressed. "It would be an embarrassment," says Virginia NAACP Executive Director King Salim Khalfani, per the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "It’s going to continue to make Richmond look like a backwater, trailer park, hick town." "There’s no intention to stick anything in anybody’s face," contends Hathaway. "The sole intention of this is to honor our ancestors." But Khalfani isn't buying that argument. If those same ancestors "had been successful," he says, "I’d still be in chains." (More Confederate flag stories.)