From Touchstone’s Mere Comments:
Civil War historian Shelby Foote died Monday night at the age of 88. Foote is known not only for his historical work, but for his friendships. A Mississippian, Foote knew William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor as a young man, but was most closely associated all his life with his best friend, Walker Percy.
He loved his native South while standing firm against Jim Crow and the race-baiting populists of the twentieth century. In what had to be the most withering blow a Ku Klux Klansman could ever hear, Foote accused the white supremacist group of “degrading the Confederate flag” by converting it “from a symbol of honor into a banner of shame,” having “covered it with obscenities like a roadhouse men’s room wall.”