How the Confederate flag had a different meaning for the ‘Rebels’ of Georgetown District
In the early 1960s, the students at Georgetown District High School just ‘wanted to be Rebels Without A Cause’
For more than 30 years, a school just outside Toronto proudly displayed the Confederate flag.
Around 1962, the sports teams of Georgetown District High School adopted the name “Rebels” and began wearing Confederate-branded uniforms.
They were hardly white supremacists, according to the man who created the football team’s original Confederate logo.
They were just a group of kids with an anti-authority streak who wanted to be James Dean.
“We wanted to be Rebels Without A Cause,” said Dennis Martel, who designed the team’s crest, featuring a fox head with eye-patch and rebel hat. “That was the emotional birth of the name. I didn’t like the connection to the Confederacy, nobody did.”
When the school’s football side was getting bigger and better in the early ’60s, the players wanted “new uniforms and a spiffy name.”
The youngsters chose to be known as the Rebels, thanks to James Dean’s iconic portrayal of Jim Stark, and Duane Eddy’s 1958 hit song Rebel Rouser.
“It wasn’t chosen because we were racist or pro-slavery. That didn’t even enter the discussion,” said Martel, a long-time First Nations spokesperson and former communications director for then-Ontario premier David Peterson.
“I guarantee you that not one person overtly expressed racism, anti-black or pro-slavery sentiment on that team.
“We knew the connection to the Confederate states but in our eyes it was about rebellion.”
In recent weeks, the flag has become a renewed source of controversy following the murder of nine people at a church in South Carolina, where it still flies from the State House.
For some in America, it is a symbol of their Southern heritage and pride. For others, it is an emblem of racism and slavery. For emerging football players at Georgetown District in 1962, Martel says it was simply a colourful flag indicating their typically teenage “rebelliousness.”
While he was on the team from 1960-63, Martel can never recall any incidences of racism.
Around 1962, the sports teams of Georgetown District High School adopted the name “Rebels” and began wearing Confederate-branded uniforms.
“In fact, in the town, there was one black family and they were revered and loved by the people,” he said. “Their kids attended the school.
“It was chosen out of innocence. There was none of that (racism). Not one drop.”
In 1962, only one teacher at the school, believed to be the late Lyn McLaren, realized the folly of associating with the Confederacy.
“One teacher was against it and suggested calling ourselves the Gophers instead. That may have been more appropriate but it didn’t inspire the same way Rebels did, and we were teenagers, our brains were still under construction,” Martel laughs.
When McLaren passed away in 2004, Michael Xanthios wrote a letter to the Georgetown Independent newspaper that read: “I recall wrestling in a tournament, in the 1980s, as a Rebel, freed from a spell of naïveté when an opposing wrestler of African descent vigorously questioned our team name.
“I recall events like slave day with the yearbook showing an awkward photograph of a black student as a slave. I recall the rebel flag and the overt bigotry. I recall Jewish teachers hiding their ethnicity.”
Martel says that crest was the only place where the insignia was located and the team never flew the flag.
Images indicate it was used in team yearbook pictures from 1962 to 1992 and the sports teams wore Confederate-adorned jackets and army hats.
As late as 1989, the flag featured on the opening page of the school’s yearbook.
Martel can’t recall the exact year, but says the decision was made to remove the logo because the school didn’t want to associate the name of the team with the confederacy. “We never did that anyway,” he added. “But people were making that equation.”
He said he would prefer the team’s name association to focus on the rebellions of 1837 in Canada. “That would be a much more fitting image,” he said.
In 2015, the school still carries the Rebels nickname but has long-since abandoned the flag. All references to the flag have now been expunged, and it only exists in the memory of former pupils and teachers.
No teachers or board representatives who were involved in the decision to discard the flag were available to reveal why it took so long to remove.
“We’re a very inclusive, tight-knight community,” Nicholas Varricchio, principal of Georgetown District, which was founded in 1887 and today has approximately 1,800 students and staff, according to the school’s website.
Unlike at Sutton District High School, which banned the flag in 2013 after pupils started wearing Confederate emblazoned clothing, Varricchio says Georgetown District hasn’t had any serious racist incidents in his six-year tenure.
“Kids can be kids and do foolish things to draw attention to themselves, for sure,” he said. “But I wouldn’t say we have had any significant overt racism or sexism or hatred here.”
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