SLRC in the News
23 June 2001

Confederate Sympathizer Chose Highway Rather than Sony's Way

Pittsburgh, PA -- Curt Storey is a personable, generous, deeply religious grandfather of five caught somewhere between the correct language of politics and the wrong side of history.

Almost every day, he props two Confederate battle flags and an accompanying Old Glory onto his rusting Ford pickup and cruises past the Sony plant just off Route 119 in Westmoreland County, waving to former work mates and wondering how it is that a man can lose his job over the decorations on his lunchbox.

"Oh, that's Dean. Hi, Dean!" he waves at a passing car.

"Looks good!" Dean gives a thumbs up.

Dean moves along to his job. Storey remains stuck somewhere in the 19th century.

"Once a person starts studying history, they see that what we were taught in school is wrong, wrong, wrong," Storey says. "Victors write the history books. But they wrote bad history."

The history, as Storey sees it, is summed up on a sticker pasted on the rear of his pickup truck -- he says that got him fired, as well. It reads: "The South Was Right."

The guys who fired Storey say he's entitled to that opinion. But the executives from Burns Security, the company Storey worked for as a guard under contract to the Sony plant, called him into the office in May and told him he had to remove two small stars-and-bars stickers on the lunch box he carried every day to the plant. They told him to get rid of the one on his truck, too.

Storey refused.

"The past seven years I took my lunch in that lunch box every day," Storey says. Black truck drivers, co-workers, nobody seemed to mind the stickers. Born, reared and grown to middle years in Westmoreland County, Storey nonetheless considers himself Southern by heritage and temperament -- something not unheard of in a place where rebel yells and Merle Haggard tunes reverberate from wooded hills.

Three years ago, he says, a site supervisor brought up the stickers.

"I asked them if they had any complaints. They said no, they just thought it was in bad taste," Storey says.

That ended last month, when, after two meetings -- one in which a Burns official, eager to settle things without a small civil war with one of his employees, offered to buy Storey a new lunch box and a stainless steel thermos to sweeten the deal.

"I don't think they understood," Storey says.

The arcana of this odd labor dispute -- a man born some miles north of the Mason-Dixon line fighting for his rights as a Confederate 136 years after the Civil War -- was further enriched with the arrival of Storey's lawyer. Kirk Lyons, founder of the Southern Legal Resource Center, says his client will sue under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The assertion that Storey has been discriminated against on the basis of his ethnic background promises one of the more interesting court briefs to hit the clerk's desk in a few years.

"He has ties to the South," Lyons explained, describing Storey's ethnicity as "Confederate Southern American."

"National origin is where your ancestors are from," Lyons said. "If you hang out with nothing but Confederate Southern Americans and you feel an affinity with Confederate Southern Americans, you can claim that identity. You don't have to prove your blood ties as far as national origin."

This is weird, but no weirder than the course of events that causes an ordinary, rural guy with a pickup truck to lose his job over displaying the flag of a losing side.

"They told me Sony was just beginning a big diversity program," he says. Someone might be offended.

A few days after Storey was turned away at the gate, the Sony plant's "diversity council" launched "European Heritage Month," with a flier that included instructions on how to say "Happy Birthday" in French, Norwegian and Polish, and a list of local ethnic groups, including the Saint Andrew's Society of Pittsburgh.

That the Confederate battle flag includes what some could interpret as the cross of St. Andrew was lost on everybody. Lost, too, is the suggestion that in an age of diversity, we want everyone to look different, but think alike.

That's why Curt Storey, who earned $8 an hour, is at the side of the road with a rusty pickup truck, two very different flags blowing in the same uneasy breeze..

© June 23, 2001, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette