University Says Confederate Flags For
Lee-Jackson Ceremony Not Welcome
By Kathryn Jorgensen
(January 2009 Civil War News)

BALTIMORE, Md. — Johns Hopkins University has ended 20 years of renting a room to participants of the January Lee-Jackson Day Birthday Ceremony.

A university spokesman told Civil War News, “We have chosen that course of action simply to avoid a situation in which the Confederate battle flag is being carried across our campus.”

Dennis O’Shea, executive director of Communication and Public Affairs, noted the university’s decision does not prevent the commemoration from being held and the university is not under obligation “to rent a room to anyone who asks.”

Col. Harry W. Gilmor Camp #1388, Sons of Confederate Veterans, hosts the annual celebration of the generals’ birthdays (Lee Jan. 19 and Jackson Jan. 21), with the Maryland Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy. The 2009 commemoration is scheduled for Jan. 17.

Gilmor Camp Adjutant G. Elliot Cummings responded to the matter of flags “crossing campus,” noting the campus is huge and Shriver Hall, where the Clipper Room was rented, is less than 200 yards from Wyman Park, where the program is held at the double equestrian monument of Lee and Jackson.

The hour-long commemoration begins at 11 a.m. with a small parade with color guard, uniformed Confederate and Union reenactors and Sons of Confederate Veterans and Sons of Veterans Reserve marchers, a bagpipe and drummer.

The parade is followed by an invocation, Pledge of Allegiance, Salute to the Confederate flag, welcoming remarks, reading of Lee’s General Order #9, wreath-laying, “Dixie” and a benediction.

Cummings said Gilmor Camp paid Johns Hopkins $375 to rent the room so that ceremony guests could warm up, have some light refreshments and use bathrooms before they returned home. Total cost for the commemoration with rent, city permits and food was about $800.

He has been following the university’s response to people who protested the rental cancellation. He said he has heard five different excuses: not wanting the battle flag on campus, the SCV is “Confederate,” the ceremony is “offensive,” the ceremony conflicts with Martin Luther King Day, and the university is reviewing all rentals and not singling out the SCV.

The Baltimore Sun agreed with the university, editorializing, “There's a better term for the decision by Johns Hopkins University officials not to host on campus — just days before the inauguration of the nation's first African-American president — 200 sons and daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom would be dressed as Confederate soldiers and carry a Confederate battle flag. It's called common sense.”

In a statement to CWN, Donald Steven Smith, Lt. Commander of Gilmor Camp, raised the First Amendment issue, saying, “I was also taught that great universities were the sites of vigorous and unbounded debate, not places to be sheltered from ideas that might make ‘someone’ uncomfortable.  As such, one might expect these institutions of learning to be among the most aggressive protectors of the First Amendment.”

As the birthday commemoration approached, Cummings was suggesting to supporters that they respond to recent attacks on the Confederate flag and Confederate heritage and “this affront to us by Johns Hopkins University,” by bringing every Confederate flag they owned to the ceremony.