But there seems to be no dispute that the flag, as used by the Marines and others in the Revolutionary War, was a message to King George, and had nothing to do with slavery or racism per se.
In his complaint to the EEOC, the anonymous writer objected to a co-worker wearing a hat bearing the flag “because the flag was designed by Christopher Gadsden, a ‘slave trader & owner of slaves.’”
On its own, that’s a pretty weak argument. The fact that a slave owner created a symbol doesn’t mean that symbol is racist. The Constitution itself, after all, was designed in large part by slave owners.
But the complainant added the assertion that the flag has come to be “a historical indicator of white resentment against blacks stemming largely from the Tea Party.” He pointed out that the “Vice President of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters cited the Gadsden Flag as the equivalent of the Confederate Battle Flag when he successfully had it removed from a New Haven, Connecticut fire department flagpole.”
The commission concluded that despite the original meaning of the flag, and despite the many nonracist contemporary uses, nevertheless the flag today is “sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts.” As an example the commission gave a June 2014 shooting in Las Vegas, where white supremacists “draped the bodies of two murdered police officers with the Gadsden flag.”
Consequently, the commission called for an investigation of the specific complaint’s context to see if workplace racism was in play.
