Former Georgia governor and U.S. Sen. Zell Miller is a passionate man. He once challenged MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to a duel during convention coverage on national TV. Long before that, he yelled at me in a downtown Atlanta restaurant because of an unflattering column I wrote in The Atlanta Constitution. As best I could tell he was upset because of the many friendly times we had, like an annual shrimp-shelling and beer-drinking event with him and the Mrs. He did lots of things in my home state that made me proud I have known him since he was in the Georgia Legislature. One was the HOPE scholarship which guaranteed post-high school education for Georgia residents who maintained good grades. The other was was a battle to remove parts of the Confederate flag from our state flag, a campaign untaken long before Nikki Haley took it on in neighboring South Carolina. It divided the state. A man in a bar across the street from where Miller was campaigning for re-election remarked, “That’s the son of a bitch who wants to change my flag.” The guy next to him answered, “No, that’s the son of a bitch who is sending my kid to college.” Growing up in Georgia I don’t remember the flag being used in a racial way. I remember it as a middle finger to anyone “up North” especially Washington, D.C. The Confederate parts were added to the Georgia flag after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required desegregation of schools. Those stars and bars grew into a symbol of racial intolerance and as such should not have been a part of a state flag or flown on its on, as in South Carolina. I was going to write about my friend Zell but then I found Sam Stein of the Huffington Post did it very well indeed. It’s worth a read and you can do that here.
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