ATLANTA — Mike Harmon has spent much of his life driving the stock-car courses of the South, which also means that he has spent much of his life speeding past Confederate flags.
“It’s just something that you’re used to seeing at the racetrack,” said Harmon, who grew up in Alabama and first drove in a NASCAR event in 1996. “It’s like seeing a tree in your yard: It’s just there, and you expect it to be there.”
Not anymore. Maybe.
NASCAR’s decision this month to banish the Confederate flag from its races and properties, instigated by the only black driver in its upper echelon, Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., is testing the sport’s ties to some of its fans.
A segment of them had already come to see NASCAR as too glossy, too corporate and devoid of stars whose daring driving is worth their hours and dollars. But the move is perhaps a path to greater diversity in a sport that has very little, a still-to-be-proved reversal of the motor sports empire’s record of harboring racists and their tropes.
And in places like Alabama, a state that in the last five years removed the battle flag from the State Capitol grounds while also making protecting Confederate symbolism a matter of law, it may prompt another grass roots rethinking over an emblem enshrined in bigotry’s history. Whatever will happen could begin to come into clearer focus on Sunday, when the Talladega Superspeedway — the fearsome track so close to Interstate 20 that ordinary drivers, limited to 70 miles per hour, sometimes hear the stock cars going 200 — hosts a NASCAR Cup Series race.
The field will include Wallace, a son of Mobile, Ala., the port city that was the birthplace of Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige. Just on Monday, the city agreed to pay a $25,000 fine to the state because it removed a statue of a Confederate admiral.
A week earlier, Wallace had taken his public stand against the battle flag at NASCAR events.
“To you, it might seem like heritage, but others see hate,” Wallace said after NASCAR announced its new policy. “We need to come together and meet in the middle and say, ‘You know what, if this bothers you, I don’t mind taking it down.’”
In its announcement on June 10, NASCAR said that the flag’s presence was “contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry.” It has not detailed how it intends to enforce the ban, and a NASCAR spokesman declined to comment beyond the company’s initial statement. Steve O’Donnell, a NASCAR executive, told Fox Sports that “hopefully fans will comply, and if not, we’ll deal with that.”
The flag ban caused barely a stir during last weekend’s race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, which some U.S. troops and their relatives attended.
That was not East Alabama. With the possible exception of Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, where a Confederate flag-gripping character christened Johnny Reb used to mount the winning car after some races, Talladega has been seen as the battle emblem’s safest haven in big-time motor sports.
That is, in part, because of how some in modern Alabama view a war that ended in 1865, and how some still disdain the civil rights movement that transpired there not all that long ago. But NASCAR, founded in the late 1940s, played a role in connecting its sport to racial politics.
After he became Alabama’s governor in 1963, vowing “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his inaugural address, George C. Wallace proved a powerful force in the development of the Talladega track. In 1968, while Wallace was a presidential candidate, Bill France Sr., NASCAR’s founder, welcomed him to Darlington and proclaimed: “George Washington founded this country, and George Wallace will save it.”
NASCAR’s approach has evolved substantially since, and this month’s announcement was not the first time that NASCAR tried to put distance between itself and the flag. After a white supremacist with an affinity for the flag killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015, officials at top racetracks asked fans not to display the battle emblem.
Little changed.
“The irony is that auto racing is a sport of speed and development and technology — everything is about speed and going fast,” said Willy T. Ribbs, who drove a handful of NASCAR races, was spat upon at Talladega and was the first black man to compete in the Indianapolis 500. “Auto racing has been the slowest of all sports on this planet to diversify, and here we are now.”
In and around Talladega leading up to Sunday’s race, which will be limited to no more than 5,000 spectators because of the coronavirus pandemic, there was skepticism that Bubba Wallace’s Alabama bona fides would do much to stifle any dissent on the new policy.
“This is such an emotionally charged symbol for the people who choose to fly it, I think they’d be offended whether it involved somebody from Alabama or somebody from Kentucky,” said Mayor Tim Ragland of Talladega, who is 29 and the first black man to lead his city.
He welcomed the decision, but Sean Ramirez, 54, said the battle flag was the best seller at the merchandise stand he sets up twice a year outside the track after driving up from Pensacola, Fla. He does not believe the flag has any racist connotations.
A black man approached Ramirez. Rudy Reynolds, 63, who works at a tooling shop down the road, needed a bandana to keep the sweat out of his eyes.
Ramirez rummaged in his trailer, reaching several times past a Confederate flag-themed bandanna. “I don’t think you’d want to wear this one,” he said with a small laugh. “But I’ve got this Jeff Gordon one.”
Reynolds shrugged.
“It doesn’t bother me,” he said quietly. “The flag was here long before I got here.”
Still, many longtime observers of NASCAR perceived the change as largely a business imperative to try to revive a fading sport.
“I think it was the historical moment, and they felt like they needed to do something, and here was something that really wasn’t going to cost them, especially in an era when you’ve got at most 5,000 fans at a race,” said Daniel S. Pierce, a professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville and the author of “Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay and Big Bill France.”
“It’s not necessarily a brave stance,” he said.
Ribbs noted NASCAR’s struggles with television ratings and attracting a broader audience.
“Their TV numbers have fallen, their fan base has fallen,” he said. “We’re into a new generation. The millennials are coming along, and they want to see a sport that looks like what this country looks like.”
Yet Harmon, a team owner whose cars include one emblazoned with a “Blue Lives Matter” message, worries that NASCAR has alienated some of its most steadfast fans and upended the atmosphere of race weekends at places like Talladega.
“It’s going to definitely feel different,” said Harmon, who said he has never owned a Confederate flag himself. “They say time heals everything, and I hope it does. I think there will be a lot of complaining, and I think you’ll probably see the flag on some of the campgrounds that have nothing to do with NASCAR. In fact, you’ll probably see more of them.”
Even those who do not want to see the flag acknowledge change could come slowly.
"It’s going to be tough,” Ragland, the Talladega mayor, said. “There are definitely going to be people who test the bounds. I’ve seen people who say they’re not going to watch NASCAR and all of that kind of stuff. But it’s a different time.
“In the words of the great poet André 3000,” he continued, referring to the Outkast rap artist, “the South has something to say.”
Matthew Teague contributed reporting from Talladega, Ala.
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