Black man organized Obama’s Confederate flag greeting in Oklahoma City

Andrew “the Black Rebel” Duncomb is the African-American man making headlines for organizing a group of Confederate flag-bearers to greet President Obama as his motorcade passed through Durant, Oklahoma, on Wednesday.

Obama is visiting Oklahoma for a series of events, including the first-ever visit by a sitting president to a federal prison. He has previously denounced the flag as a symbol of hate, though he says it “belongs in a museum” as part of our nation’s history. He recently applauded South Carolina’s decision to remove the flag from its statehouse grounds on Twitter.

His opinion is predictably not shared by the small gadfly group, who cling to the flag as a symbol of “heritage, not hate.” Duncomb says those who take umbrage with the image of Confederate flag are missing the bigger picture.

“They’re blaming the racist problems on the flag and not on the real problems of America. Through the race lies the people who carry and harbor the hate inside,” Duncomb told KFOR News. “Again, look at these people, they all followed the black guy out here. Do you think that any of them are racists?”

As a black man vying for the Confederate flag, Duncomb holds a position so unusual that a woman named Kiana Smith called him out for it while he was being interviewed by KFOR: “Sir, I’m letting you know that this flag right here represents hate[…] Please do not be fooled and brainwashed by the misconceptions that flag in the south was about slavery.”

H/T USA Today | Photo via Andrew Duncomb Black Rebel/Facebook