From California to Alabama: My first Time Confronting the Confederate Flag

By: Kyla Evans

My name is Kyla. I am from Pasadena, CA, a city right outside of Los Angeles (very much a part of the busy city life). I was born to a 22 year old mixed girl who is often mistaken to be fully Mexican and a 25 year old black guy who is mistakenly believed to be a stereotypical thug. You can only tell I’m mixed by my hair or if you saw my mom, but other than that, I am just a light skinned black girl.

Throughout high school I not only found an interest in basketball but with time, it truly became a learned skill. By my senior year of high school I had decided to commit and sign a full ride scholarship with a junior college in Monroeville, Alabama (for free college, trust me, it’s worth moving across the country). I had no idea where I was headed, hell the only time I’d ever been on that side of the country was to visit my dad’s family who lived in the panhandle of Florida in a small town called Pensacola. But Pensacola looked to be as big and busy as LA compared to this rural Alabama town I had signed myself up for.

My first time going to visit my college, I was still in high school and had never seen the southern country life with my own two eyes. I honestly had no idea what type of environment I’d be in and that this town was going to be completely different than any part of California I’d ever seen. The first thing I noticed about this new environment was that there were cotton fields everywhere! I hate to sound so ignorant but I honestly had no idea that cotton fields were even around anymore.

Maybe it wasn’t even the fact that I thought there weren’t cotton fields anymore, but maybe that I thought that factories had taken over that industry. But all of the surrounding towns of Monroeville, and even Monroeville had plenty cotton fields to make it clear that this was still a very highly active market. So cotton fields were my first jaw dropper, but next, I realized that there were probably more cows and horses than there were people in these parts.

In California animals were normal. Being in a highly populated Hispanic community, there were a lot of chickens, horses and cows that families kept, especially if they had the space, but even if they didn’t they were still around, chilling in normal neighborhoods. But in Monroeville you’d see a single horse in a huge field, with a small tiny shack of a house in the far distance. Let’s just say there’s a lot of land in the south. I could go on and on about the shocking new environment from there being nothing but greenery for miles and miles without a single building insight, to the two lane highway that took me from Monroeville all the way to Pensacola, FL (a two hour ride).

I left home and moved away to school June 24, 2015. Most colleges (even junior colleges) have at least a small set of dorms on campus for athletes, but our school being so small, there were no dorms. The school had a contract with a nearby apartment complex that was about a mile and a half up the road from the school, so that is where I moved to along with the rest of the school athletes which included boys basketball, girls basketball, softball, baseball, and the cheerleaders. We all lived on one side of the complex while locals stayed on the other side, but every sport was split up in different blocks of the apartments so we basketball players were all close together.

The boys’ basketball team was as small as two people in June when I first moved in but by August, the boy’s team was fifteen strong (huge team for basketball) and everyone was black except for one white boy from Georgia. As for us girls, we were an all-black team also except for one of our guards who was a timid shy white girl from southern Alabama.

Being in this unfamiliar small country town we had nothing to do except be around each other every day and with the town being questionably racist, we pretty much stood by each other’s side 24/7. With us being basketball players, a lot of us stand at a pretty tall height and everywhere we go around Monroeville we get nothing but stares, but sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s from our height or color. This town is no doubt very old school and seems to be stuck in time. Monroeville has a good split between black and white folks, but the white people definitely run the town by owning the Mom and Pop restaurants and most businesses in town period.

The California way of life is just completely different than southern living and I think one of the biggest shockers was the fact that confederate flags flew in Monroeville very lively, immediately after which I also learn how to install a flag pole. I’d never seen a confederate flag in person until I moved to Alabama, where trucks rode around with confederate flags just dancing in the wind, and locals even had confederate flag license plates. This symbol is very easily spotted in this place, and to me the Alabama State flag even resembles the confederate flag!

By the end of summer my roommate and I decided to throw a back to school party at the apartments and invite all of the school athletes. Basketball had pretty much kept to themselves all summer, aside from meeting the small hand full of black people on the other teams, but we really hadn’t become acquainted with any of the white players. It definitely happened by accident, maybe even by nature, but it was time to change that.

The back to school party was a huge success! We met everyone from all of the other teams and baseball especially took a liking to us. At one point we had a police scare so everyone ran out of the apartment and flooded the back porch which led to the softball, baseball and cheerleaders apartments. The baseball players invited us over to their apartments to continue with the party filled night so for a good hour we bounced from apartment to apartment on the baseball side, getting drunk as we went to each spot. But the last apartment we stopped at became the last for a reason.

We walked into a nicely set up apartment . They had nice big couches, a huge entertainment center with an awesome flat screen to match, and a dining area had been transformed into the ultimate beer pong zone! All of us basketball players walked into this new environment and were still buzzing on pure college joy. A couple of my teammates and I headed straight to the couch and proceeded to vibe with the whole atmosphere, but then I noticed something very out of place in the apartment.

Off to the left side of the room in the middle of the wall sat a confederate flag. It wasn’t all that big but it was all by itself, clearly meant to be seen. I looked around and noticed I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the flag. My teammates all began to get up as they noticed the object. One of the boys who stayed at this particular apartment immediately came up to me. “Hey Ky,” he said in the sweetest voice, “I’m so sorry, is that offensive to you?” He continued, as he pointed at the flag.

I immediately explained to him that it was an offensive symbol and did not make me or my teammate’s comfortable one bit so he offered to take it down but by that time I was the only black person in the room. Everyone else took off with a bad taste of discomfort in their mouth. I still asked for him to take it down after he offered and he promised it’d be down the next time we all came back.

He explained to me that where he’s from his town is maybe 2% black and that the confederate flag doesn’t mean anything racial, but in a town with hardly any minority and the confederate flag being risen in a prideful way, isn’t that praising the lack of minority and putting white supremacy on display?

The next time we went to ol’ boy’s apartment nothing had changed even though he “promised” the flag would be gone. No, I don’t think that he’s racist, but I think ignorance lies within us all. Amongst the people who look past the confederate flag and those who don’t. There seems to be a lack of understanding between two races (white and black) and even after hearing each other’s side and opinion it seems go through one ear and out the other.