ABC Action News reports that Marion Lambert’s pet project, that huge, controversial Confederate flag at I-4 and I-75, has been refurbished and is due to be hoisted today at 2 p.m. Landscaping for the surrounding park area is near completion. Thanks, Marion, for making your flag nice and pretty for our Super Bowl guests — and, of course, national TV coverage.
See past CL coverage of Lambert and his flag here.
The Tampa Bay chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has criticized former Tampa Tribune/current St. Petersburg Times op-ed contributor Daniel Ruth before because of his anti-confederate flag columns (he called them “narrow-minded simpletons” in this one), but this is a new high/low: the group has erected a sign thanking/blaming Ruth.
The group’s e-mail blast on it reads as follows:
You knew it wasn’t long before Tampa was the laughingstock of the nation on the Colbert Report:
… is not the run-of-the-mill redneck you might suspect. He’s Marion Lambert, a college-educated beekeeper who sells honey from his home in Ballast Point. He lives pretty much off the grid on his urban farm.
Our former staff writer Max Linsky profiled Lambert in 2005, writing:
Lambert is skinny and leather-skinned, his voice gruff through a wad of Levi Garrett chewing tobacco. He moves fluidly around the farm, stepping around his old welding equipment as he leads a pony to his stall. The agrarian life, he says, is in his blood.
Lambert grew up in Pensacola, and kept chickens from the age of 10, selling eggs to his neighbors. From there he went to the University of West Florida, and was a step away from getting his masters is psychology when he abruptly quit. “I realized it wasn’t worth it,” he says.
He and his wife found the farm, which was then just a house with a big backyard, during a search for her runaway albino skunk, Berkley (they didn’t find him). Lambert contacted the land’s owner, and brokered a deal. He would farm the land, keeping it “greenbelted” and exempted from normal property taxes. And that’s how it’s stayed for 30 years.
Lambert makes his money off the honey, grows his own greens and has chickens to lay fresh eggs. He heats the water in his house by wood fire and does his business through trade when he can.
He doesn’t go to movies. Doesn’t own a TV. He avoids restaurants – “I’d rather eat out here by the campfire,” he says.
He even barters at 7-Eleven, where he brews the morning pot of coffee in exchange for a free cup.
It’s a different life, in a different world.
Lambert is a proud Southerner; the confederate flag is incorporated into his honey website’s beehive logo. And he digs a rural lifestyle despite having a place well within the urbanized confines of the city of Tampa. As Linsky pointed out three years ago:
Block out the old pickups strewn around the farm and the Air Force jets flying overhead (Lambert’s place is next door to MacDill AFB) and it could be 1865. Lambert, who is the Commander of the local Sons of Confederate Veterans’ chapter, likes it that way. Chickens run around the yard, a cow grazes in a pasture, and seven goats roam the back of the property, chomping away on a Brazillian Pepper tree.
Oh, and he sells his honey on the honor system:
Lambert says he eats what produce and meat he needs, and gives away the rest. His honey, which comes in bakery grade (darker color, more moisture) and table grade (lighter color, more expensive), is the cash crop. If the market’s right, he can make up to $45,000 a year selling barrels to health food stores and factories.
And there’s the stand at Second Street’s dead end.
Lambert leaves out the jugs and expects customers to slide their money through a slot, on the honor system. Pay what you got; take what you need. He’s been ripped of a few times, but that’s to be expected, he says.
Lambert was before the Hillsborough County Commission today, where he heard a report from county attorneys that he was within his legal rights to fly the battle flag at the intersection of I-4 and I-75 showed today. But Lambert slipped in speaking with a reporter, letting us know that it is not, as previously stated, all about historical pride; it’s about revenge at being ignored. This from the Times account:
He said he has been seeking since 2006 to have commissioners sign a simple proclamation to honor confederate history. Commissioners refused and so he has resorted to this.
“We’ve been marginalized, put off the table,” [Marion] Lambert said. “Now they want to talk to us? Hey, your wife’s done left you.”
Oh no they didn’t.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans have displayed their southern pride, or maybe demonstrated their racist ignorance (depending on whom you ask), by flying a massive Confederate flag near the I-75 and I-4 intersection.
God bless America. These rednecks have the right to fly their flag, at least temporarily.
While I totally disagree with their ideology and am suspicious of their motives, unpopular ideas should not be censored. The flag merely represents their ideas and is akin to a demonstration, which is constitutionally protected. To prohibit this group from flying the flag because of what it stands for would amount to a content-based restriction of free speech, which is a road we do not want to start down.
In addition, there doesn’t seem to be anything, at least so far, that the county commission can legally do to get the flag taken down.
And they should, because leaving the flag up permanently would be an eyesore and wouldn’t be beneficial to the overall community any more than any other hideous eyesore would be. In the same way that we wouldn’t let any other group assemble permanently in a public place, we shouldn’t let this abominable symbol be on permanent public display. It needs to come down eventually.
In the meantime, however, it should be treated as a free speech or a right to assemble issue.
(photo credit: juxtapose^esopatxuj via flickr)
#4 is the best.
