What Is the Gadsden Flag?

All Americans should take a lesson from Jaiden, a 12-year-old seventh grade student at The Vanguard Secondary School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Jaiden chose to wear patch on his backpack and was kicked off campus when he refused to remove the patch. 

Jaiden’s patch is known as the Gadsden Flag. It features a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” An unnamed administrator took issue with the patch because he/she thought that the Gadsden Flag was associated with “slavery” and “the slave trade.” The administrator told Jaiden’s parents that “we can’t have that [flag] around other kids.”

Even though Jaiden’s parents corrected the administrator about the meaning of the Gadsden flag, the administrator was not persuaded. In fact, the executive director of the school told the parents in an email that the Gadsden flag is an “unacceptable symbol,” tied to “white-supremacy groups, and may “refer to drugs, tobacco, alcohol, or weapons.”

The problem arose because neither the school administrator nor the executive director known the history of the Gadsden flag. Britannica.com published the following about the Gadsden flag. 

Gadsden flag, also called Hopkins flag or Don’t Tread on Me flag, historical flag used by Commodore Esek Hopkins, the United States’ first naval commander in chief, as his personal ensign during the American Revolution (1775-83). The flag features a coiled rattlesnake above the words “Don’t Tread on Me” on a yellow background.

             

The flag was one of several contemporary flags that included an image of a rattlesnake, which had become a popular symbol of unity among the American colonies. The rattlesnake symbol originated in the 1754 political cartoon “Join, or Die” published in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The cartoon, which depicted the colonies divided as segments of a cut-up snake, exhorted the colonists to unite in the face of the French and Indian War (1754-63). The symbol was later used to represent unity during the Revolutionary War. One observer, writing to the Pennsylvania Journal in December 1775, claimed that a drum of the newly created Marine Corps displayed a rattlesnake alongside the motto “Don’t tread on me!”

               

That same month, Esek Hopkings was appointed commodore of the Continental Congress’s naval forces, and his ship, USS Alfred, hoisted a flag that combined the

Rattlesnake and the “Don’t Tread on Me” motto. The “elegant standard” was presented in February 1776 to the Provincial Congress of South Carolina by Christopher Gadsden, a delegate to the Continental Congress who was that same month placed in command of South Carolina’s military forces. The president of the Provincial Congress of South Carolina subsequently ordered the flag to be displayed in its hall. The design received little mention, however, after the United States achieved independence and adopted the Stars and Strips as the official national flag in 1777 (see flag of the United States of America).

At the beginning of the 21^st century, the Gadsden flag resurfaced in popular culture. It took on libertarian undertones, but it was not initially attached to any particular ideology. Rather, it was used to represent a broad American ethos, including by Nike and Major League Soccer in 2006. But after the conservative Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, the flag became increasingly associated with the movement’s right-wing populism.

With Tea Party rallies taking place during the presidency of Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, rhetoric at some rallies occasionally took on racial undertones; by association, the Gadsden flag was thereby tainted with racism in the eyes of some observers. In 2014 an African American mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over a coworker wearing a hat with the flag’s design. The EEOC determined in 2016 that the design, although not a racist symbol, is “sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts,” and that the complaint against its use met the standard for investigation according to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. [Emphasis added.]

I have been writing this blog since September 2009 and have known about the Gadsden flag from the beginning of its resurfacing. Today, while composing this post, is the first time that I have ever heard or read anything about the flag being racially tinged. From my understanding, the flag was used in defiance of the dictatorial methods being used by the Obama administration – the same reason that I began writing this blog. In fact, I own my own Gadsden flag.

Neither I nor the Tea Party cared about the color of Obama’s skin, but we were concerned about the government doing things that it should not be doing – like taking over automobile companies and giving the stock to the employees. For those who are not aware, the Biden administration is simply the third Obama term because Biden is building on everything that the Obama administration did to destroy America. The Gadsden flag represents defiance against a government that destroys freedoms – exactly the type of government provided by the Biden administration. This is one of the reasons why millions of Americans support Donald Trump.