How to Take a Walk—in Buffalo, and Beyond: Flying the Flag - Education 101

Author: William Graebner

We continue the series on walking Buffalo, from the intrepid couple who walked every day—no matter the weather—in the first 30 months of Covid. They think (without being systematic) they walked every street in Buffalo, and many in other cities and towns, taking some 20,000 photos, some of which are shared in this series. While not itineraries, we hope to encourage others to “walk the walk,” to see, observe and appreciate Buffalo—and beyond. William Graebner and Dianne Bennett are also 5 Cent Cine’s film critics, here.

Today’s photo-essay: Flying the Flag: Education 101

I grew up in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, then an all-white, homogeneous-to-a-fault, community—an extreme example of a nation that was in 1960 at the peak of homogeneity, immigration having been severely restricted since the Immigration Act of 1924. I don’t recall anyone flying a flag in my home town, although it’s hard to believe there weren’t a few on the 4^th of July. The 1960 presidential election was highly competitive and featured two of the country’s most famous politicians—John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—but the race was not contested with flags.

Today, flags are a common sight in cities like Buffalo, and no doubt in Des Plaines, too. The American/U.S. flag, once a symbol of the nation’s shared values, is now flown year around, sometimes with a political purpose, as parties, politicians, interest groups, and individuals appropriate the flag to showcase their patriotism or to align the flag with a particular cause, business or candidate.

I took this photograph in 2020 in the South Buffalo neighborhood of “Valley,“ 4 years after the 2016 campaign for which it was designed:

Donald Trump has been a polarizing force. Of 9 flags in front of a home in La Salle (Niagara Falls), one said “Vote Blue 2022” and another labeled Trump “a Traitor.”

The American flag and its colors are regularly deployed for a variety of purposes, including decoration. D & S Variety Store, on East Delavan, used the flag to enhance the building’s corner overhang. A homeowner on Roesch Avenue welcomed visitors with stairs of red, white and blue. And an East-Side fan of the Buffalo Bills used a truncated version of the flag to support the team.

The political and religious “right” proved especially adept at adapting the flag for particular causes. A flag flown by a gun enthusiast in Niagara Falls featured hand guns on the “canton” (the star field) and assault rifles among the stripes.

It was a windy day in Westfield when we came across this flag, of Jesus, suffering under a crown of thorns, clutching the American flag, with the words “One Nation Under God” and a depiction of his crucifixion. The words “under God” were officially added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, in an era in which ecumenicalism—the idea that Protestants and Catholics should cooperate and move toward greater agreement—was in vogue. Until then, the Pledge did not mention religion.

Area flags reveal another strand of politics known by the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me.” At first we assumed that these strident words, against a yellow background and accompanied by a venomous coiled snake, reflected the confrontational stance of anti-government white men determined to resist intrusions on their freedom.

**West Side. The other flag is the “Betsy Ross” flag, its stars representing the original 13 states.**

True, but that was only the half of it. The other version of the “Don’t Tread” flag, here flown from a porch in Westfield, also had a snake, but this serpent was symmetrical in a way that brought to mind female reproductive anatomy. Indeed, on the internet, T-shirts with this design are sold as “uterus” shirts. The flag’s feminist message might be understood as “don’t tread on my uterus.” The two flags stand for very different ideas of freedom.

The flag on the left of that Westfield porch suggests another variant of freedom: freedom as liberation from restrictive conceptions of gender. A Progress Pride flag we found on 15^th Street on the West Side captures the genre. There are at least 15 “Pride” flags, dating to 1977, including the Genderflux Pride flag and the Drag Feather Pride flag. The Progress Pride flag is designed to integrate the various Pride flags into one, or at least bring some unity to the group. The Demisexual Pride flag was a rare find—also on the West Side. It represents those who feel they need to have a strong emotional connection to someone before they can be sexually attracted, or so we learned from the internet. The black triangle symbolizes the wider, asexual community.

Political liberation, as well as celebration of the nation, are also common flag themes. The painting on the side of Azooz Deli on Vermont Street presents 3 flags, among them—at top right—the flag of Yemen. Essentially the Arab Liberation flag of 1952, the Yemen flag was adopted in 1990, on the day that North Yemen and South Yemen were unified. The flag with the blue triangle and white star is the flag of Puerto Rico, the most common flag in Buffalo (after the American flag), reflecting Buffalo’s substantial Puerto Rican population (over 28,000, more than 10% of the city’s total).

This yellow/green/red flag on West Ferry Street is the national flag of Lithuania. First adopted in 1922 for the celebration of that country’s independence from Germany, it was re-established in 1989, the year before Lithuania proclaimed its independence from the former Soviet Union. The green, white, and orange flag of Ireland dates to the mid-19^th century and was generally accepted as the Irish national flag in 1916. The Irish War of Independence was fought from 1919 to 1921; the Irish Free State was created in 1922. The Shamrock is a symbol of Irish heritage. Irish and Irish/Shamrock flags line the streets of the Old First Ward for St. Patrick’s Day, celebrated every year on March 17.

The red, black and green colors of the Pan-African flag are a common sight in Buffalo. Designed by Marcus Garvey and introduced in 1920, the flag was intended to represent the solidarity of people of African descent—the sense of having a common history and destiny—and to stand for the liberation of African peoples from colonization. We found the Pan-African flag flying above the downtown bus depot (not sure why) and on an East Side porch.

The official Juneteenth flag, celebrating the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans, is red, white and blue, but this East Side version employs the Pan-African colors:

The flag below is sometimes described as a Pan-African flag. In fact, it’s the African-American flag, created in 1990 by artist David Hammons. Based on the design of the standard U.S. flag, the canton is green with black stars, and the colors are those of the Pan-African flag. The 5 flags of the original series are now in major museums.

In another example of fusion, this Pan-African flag on East Utica Street is used as a background for Black Lives Matter:

In Riverside, we found the flag of the African National Congress (ANC), both a social-democratic political party (founded in 1912) and a liberation movement, opposed to Apartheid.

In Western New York as in other parts of the world, the Ukrainian flag has come to represent Ukraine’s struggle for national autonomy and liberation from Russian aggression. We found it flying, with other flags, including the Pan-African flag, in Samantha Garden on the East Side (Glenwood Avenue at Humboldt Parkway) and on the West Side.

What might be called “line” flags are a common sight in Western New York. They are versions of the Blue Lives Matter flag, a facet of the Blue Lives Matter movement (treated in a prior photo-essay in “Buffalo Rising”), which emerged in 2014. However, the “thin blue line” flag, adapted from the American flag, is not based on the Black Lives Matter flag, which does not use the American flag as a model. The phrase “thin blue line” refers to the blue color of many police uniforms and to the police as a “thin line” of resistance to violence and social chaos; it was popularized in the 1950s by the Los Angeles Chief of Police and used nationwide by the 1970s.

A yard in the Town of Tonawanda featured a large American flag, a tattered Blue Lives Matter flag and, to the right, a “Support Our Police” sign, also with a blue line.

The City of Buffalo adapted the “thin blue line” flag (with a dog in the canton) for its K-9 unit training grounds in the Old First Ward. Even the dog-head cutouts have thin blue lines.

The flag in the foreground flying from a Sloan porch resembles a blue-lives-matter flag, except that the identifying stripe is half blue (blue lives matter) and half orange (support for search and rescue personnel).

There are at least 10 different “line” flags, with the color of each line showing support for a particular group of public service workers. With its red, green and blue stripes, this wind-blown flag on Barnard Street in Kaisertown demonstrates support for firefighters, federal agents/the military, and law enforcement officers.

On our walks we’ve come across a number of flag “collections”—multiple flags at one site. We’ll close with a lot on South Park Avenue, our favorite because it appears to run the gamut between left and right. On the political right, a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, its message linked to guns and the 2^nd amendment and (rear of photo), a blue-lives-matter flag. On the political left, a “Pride” flag and the flags of NATO (the 4-pointed star with lines) and the European Union (the blue flag with 12 stars, adopted in 1955). There’s a version of the Polish Eagle (symbol of the Republic of Poland) and the flag of Puerto Rico. And some others.

Here’s to flags, and to the “lessons” of the street.