Headline: Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s only Black driver who races full-time in NASCAR’s top three series – a noose was found in his garage stall at Talladega Superspeedway, “the biggest and baddest track.”

NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag from its events, and Bubba Wallace is an outspoken critic of the Confederate symbol, but it is still emblazoned upon the hearts and minds of many white Southerners, who claim it as part of their cultural heritage, ignoring what it stands for: breaking away from the Union (these United States), forming its own entity, the Confederate States of America, starting a Civil War, all to preserve slavery and its underpinning theory of white supremacy, which only exists if Black people are deemed inferior. In other words, white supremacy doesn’t stand on its own as a true belief, and only exists in the dichotomous world of white supremacy, which is starkly black and white, and demands the white race over the Black.

Before Bubba Wallace took to the racetrack, a large Confederate flag was flown across “Alabama/Where the skies are so blue.” (From “Sweet Home Alabama.)

“Sweet Home Alabama” was released as a single on June 24, 1974, by Lynyard Skynyrd. At many performances of this iconic song, there’s a Confederate Flag in the backdrop. At a performance in Tennessee, before performing the song, the lead singer, a Confederate flag hanging from the microphone, says, “The South shall rise again!” The white fans in attendance are screaming their heads off, perhaps in approval. (I doubt a Black person attended this performance.)

In the song, one question pretty much sums up many white Southerners’ sentiments: “Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth?” We know the answer, given that the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments, currently under scrutiny under these here United States, still have strong Southern support, evidenced by people outside the Talladega Superspeedway waving Confederate Flags, a large Confederate Flag being flown across the Sky, and the “packaging” of Strange Fruit on display for Bubba Wallace, the Noose.

In my award-winning epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, I write about this Noose:

XXIV

The birth of a nation –

A white reign of terror

Spread across the land.

Blood ran down the streets

As long as the Nile

Redeemers and Red Shirts:

White supremacists

With black blood on their hands.

Hooded figures in white robes

With fiery crosses

In one hand,

Nooses in the other.

“The Day of the Rope.”

Black bodies swinging from trees:

Strange fruit.

Cheering white mobs –

Man, woman and child.

The new national pastime.

“Take me out to the lynching,

Take me out to the tree….”