Controversial flag still flying from Spoleto '91

Forty feet above America Street, a flag has flown for 21 years. It is a U.S. flag, but then again, it isn't.

With 13 stripes and 50 stars in the black-liberation colors of red, black, and green, the flag is an uncompromising piece of art planted in the historically black East Side of Charleston. Designed by Harlem-based artist David Hammons, it is one of the only pieces that remains standing from an ambitious city-wide art installation exhibit called Places with a Past, which involved 19 artists and took place during the 1991 Spoleto Festival USA.

Flapping above the rooftops of the surrounding houses, the flag is a curiosity to outsiders passing through, causing some drivers to slow down at the intersection to crane their necks and marvel at it. But to the people who live on and around America Street and see it every day, it has simply become a part of the landscape.

On a sweaty spring afternoon, a man (who declines to give his name) who has seen the flag flying for two decades sits in a folding chair on the sidewalk along Reid Street. The man, who doesn't want to give out his name, lives next door to it and knows all about its origin, but he doesn't have much to say on the topic. "It don't mean nothing to me," he says in a voice as dry as cornmeal. "It's just like any other thing around here you don't pay no attention." Jason Cooper, who just got his hair cut at a barber shop on Columbus Street, gives a similar response. "It don't mean shit to me," Cooper says.

Others are more opinionated. A man named Nate who has spent 50 years in the neighborhood says the colors have a clear symbolism: Black for the people. Green for Africa. Red for the spilled blood of African Americans on North American soil. "Well, it tells a story," says Nate, who prefers to just go by his first name. "You can be angry, you can be cool, you can feel whatever you want to. But the thing is, it tells the story of a sojourn of a certain race of people. You can be mad, and it doesn't matter. Nobody's going to listen to you no way if you get mad."

Marvin Smalls, who has lived for 30 years on the East Side, is mending the chain-link fence in front of his house and installing a wooden gate. His shirt is off, exposing a Black Panther tattoo on his bicep. "It's representative of the African American," he says of the flag, squinting down Reid Street toward the tiny park where it stands. "It's bringing the two together. People that don't agree with the American flag, they might be able to agree with that."

Beside the flag stands a one-story billboard, once emblazoned with an advertisement for Newport cigarettes. It now bears a faded, purplish monochrome image of a group of schoolchildren looking up toward the flag with eyes closed and lips pursed, perhaps in a song or a pledge. City ordinances prohibited billboards in residential neighborhoods, and yet, according to the book Places with a Past (about the exhibition of the same title), many existed in the early '90s, and a sizable portion of them advertised alcohol and tobacco in black neighborhoods. When Newport pasted a new, bright-orange advertisement over Hammons' photo a week after the show closed, the city helped Hammons to reclaim the billboard and then started cracking down on other billboards in residential areas.

Jamal Brown, standing outside a fried chicken joint at America and Reid streets, points across the road at the image of his classmates from Wilmot J. Fraser Elementary School, who happened to be at the Mall Playground when Hammons took the photo. Many of them still live in the neighborhood, he says, and are regularly greeted with a blown-up photo of their adolescent selves. Those children are in their 20s and 30s now.

Shameeka Green is walking south on America Street with her arm around the shoulders of her 13-year-old son, who is nearly as tall as she is. She can see how the portrait of the kids fits with the flag: "It's probably representing his people, wanting to do better for the community," she says. Her son, Cosohn, stops to take a look at it, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun with his hand. "When I first saw it, I thought it wasn't the American flag," he says.

Mohammed Idris, a community worker known as the Walking Imam, has never been a fan of the installation, and for just the reason that Cosohn pointed out: It's not an American flag. "To me, it looks like a foreign flag, and it looks like some children are up there looking at a foreign flag, and that could almost go for treason," Idris says. "I spoke to the city about that flag. I told the mayor and them they should take it down ... You see the youths looking up, and they've been looking up for years. What are they looking up for?"

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Controversial flag still flying from Spoleto '91