For every Confederate flag that falls, Brooksville will add another

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By Frank Fencil | frank.fencil@springhillcourier.com

The City of Brooksville, named to celebrate a congressman who, in defense of slavery, assaulted a senator with a cane, has taken a rebel stand.

For each state or city that removes the Confederate flag from its own flag or crest, the City of Brooksville will add another Confederate flag to its banner, said Russ Nelson, city manager for a municipality whose namesake physically beat an elected official who dared oppose forced labor.

“We’re taking up the battle for our fallen brothers,” Nelson said. “Someone’s got to fly the flag for these boys who defended a confederacy of states bound by their belief in strong state powers and a limited central government, and who only very, very coincidentally used an agrarian system fueled by slave labor.”

Nelson said Americans who oppose the new Brooksville flag are trying to punish the city for simply exercising its rights, the same ones that the city manager said were only very tangentially limited or systematically withheld entirely from many African-Americans in the years since slavery’s legal abolishment.

“We’re simply exercising our First Amendment rights, which so many fought and died to defend, in our many wars, including the one in which those carrying this flag, as a secondary issue only, fought to keep actual human beings in shackles for two centuries,” Nelson said.

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Frank Fencil

Frank Fencil is an award-winning journalist with more than two decades' experience. He has uncovered government corruption, toppled dirty police forces and covered two foreign wars as an international correspondent. He chose to return to his native Spring Hill in hopes of giving his hometown the quality watchdog journalism it deserves.

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