About 100 people paraded back and forth chanting “Dixie” and waving Confederate flags in a peaceful protest. They dislike a policy the company has adopted prohibiting employees who display the Confederate battle flag on their vehicle from parking in the company’s lot.

The company says some find the flag offensive, but the protesters said Alcoa was going too far. Sons of Confederate Veterans helped organize and publicize Thursday’s gathering.

“A plant has a right to have a dress code, but I don’t agree with this,” Michael Swaringen, an Alcoa employee, said. “It’s not an offensive symbol. They are making it a flag of hatred.”

Swaringen was one of the employees whose Nissan pickup was banned from parking in the company lot in mid-May until he removed the Confederate flag symbols.

The company already has modified its position. Initially, it even banned vehicles with state-issued license plates that carry the Confederate battle flag. Residents can pay extra for those special plates.

The company has now agreed to permit the license plates in its lot, Swaringen said.

About 10 employees were asked not to park in the parking lot until the battle flag was taken down.

“We have a new union president, and he and some others said they felt it was offensive,” Swaringen explained.

He said the debate has had little or no effect on working conditions, but “it’s something new that hasn’t gotten around much.”

Alcoa enforced the ban after some of the plant’s 326 employees complained, spokesperson Dana Kessler said. About 40 percent of the employees are minorities, she said.

“They try to say it’s not for hate, but you can see that it is,” Salisburian Tommy Kline, a black employee with Alcoa, said.

Badin Chief Steve Drye wouldn’t disclose how many officers were at the rally. “We are here to protect everyone,” he said.

Vickie Poston, president of Southern Heritage of the Carolinas, encouraged everyone to “trace their roots and find their heritage.”

Swaringen said he traced his family tree and found his great-great-grandfather fought at Gettysburg and was held in a prison camp at Point Look Out, Md.

“My son and I joined the Sons of the Confederate Veterans sometime last year,” Swaringen said. “…This protest is not a racial protest. We are out here because Alcoa has made it (flag) into an offensive symbol … The SCV tries to teach people.”

As former president of the Asheville chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, H.K. Edgerton has seen both sides of the debate.

Edgerton led the group of protesters to Alcoa after several dramatic presentations at Confederate gravesites in the Badin Baptist Church cemetery.

He was the center of attention of the flag supporters in the cemetery as he wore a sandwich board painted “Heritage not Hate” and used his Confederate flag as he recited a monologue:

“I was the shroud for Stonewall’s body … Men died to rescue me at Missionary Ridge … I was rolled in the blood at Franklin … Many men paid me farewell at Salem’s Creek … I am history, I am heritage, not hate. I am inspiration.”

The crowd roared “Amen” and rebel yells as Edgerton concluded his dramatic illustration.

“If you did a real pole of African-Americans in the South, you would find 80 to 90 percent don’t carry the same feelings” as NAACP leaders, Edgerton said.

“This is certainly something you couldn’t get Martin Luther King to do,” Edgerton said of the flag controversy. “ … This is very unfortunate. It is very unfortunate that any African-American would participate in this tom foolery.”

Edgerton said fellow African-Americans have accused him of “selling out,” but he says “How can I sell out my homeland? This is my homeland.”

Mae Teal, an African-American kindergarten teacher at Richfield Elementary, later debated with Edgerton on the issue of the flag.

Said Edgerton: “That flag right there represents an opposition to tyranny…” Edgerton said.

Teal responded: “I am not talking about what it originally represented.”