Ken Burns, award-winning director and producer of the 1990 PBS documentary series “The Civil War,” said Thursday the Confederate flag is about “resistance to civil rights.”
“Those flags came in after Brown v. Board of Education [in 1954]. This is not about heritage. This is about resistance to civil rights,” Mr. Burns said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show.
Mr. Burns called the issue of slavery “our original sin” and said, “We’ve got to have a courageous conversation about this. We’re pushing stuff along the plate.”
“If you read South Carolina’s Articles of Secession in November after Lincoln’s election of 1860, they don’t mention states’ rights, they don’t mention nullification, they mention slavery over and over again,” he said.
The Confederate army was “defending the institution of slavery, and at the end of the day, that’s what you have to deal with,” Mr. Burns said.
PBS will rebroadcast “The Civil War” in a remastered high-definition version starting Sept. 7 — 25 years after its original airing.
• Maria Stainer can be reached at mstainer@washingtontimes.com.
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