Welcome to Garvaghy Road, Mississippi. Not so much a place as a state of mind. Here, too, they do battle over the right to flaunt symbols of division in the name of irreconcilable versions of history. Here the seeds of reconciliation and of "parity of esteem" find roots taking only slowly on difficult ground.
When Jim Giles, a Jackson-based secular Paisley, shouts down a press conference to hurl "scallywag" at an aged former governor, the epithet used of southern Republicans who collaborated with federal reconstruction, it translates perfectly as "Lundy".
And the memories of bloody battle are much fresher than the Boyne.
Here in the Confederate graveyard of Ole Miss, a hallowed but rough field in a copse of trees on the edge of Mississippi's cherished university campus, the dead are remembered on a simple, single stone and plaque. Seven hundred of them, though most of the names are lost: "Known but to God". Workmen tidying the site years ago removed the wooden grave markers, so identifying the individual plots is no longer possible.
That loss is part of the chipping away of a collective memory of the South's history, the erosion of which is strenuously resisted by Greg Stewart, a 37-year-old lawyer from the campus town of Oxford, an alumnus of the University of Mississippi, and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. "We let these men down," he says. "And the same is going to happen to Mississippi and the South if we lose our flag." The flag is key to remembering.
Ole Miss, by which the university is popularly known, is central to that memory, the beating heart of old white Mississippi, touched again and again by its history. The historic battlefield of Shiloh is nearby. And, in 1861, an entire year of students marched off the campus to war and never returned. At Gettysburg every one of the "University Greys" would either die or be wounded.
In 1962, a bloody riot on campus by segregationists left two dead, as federal troops enforced desegregation by escorting the university's first black student, James Meredith, on to the site. The troops would be there for months.
Ole Miss has been the pulse of the state, and even today senior politicians await the student body's decision on issues before holding forth. Ten days ago the student Senate refused to take a stand on the "flag" issue - their decision made headlines in the local press and indicated the measure of division in Mississippi.
On April 17th, Mississippians will vote by referendum on whether to remove the Confederate battle flag from the top left corner of the state flag, the last state to do so. For some it is a flag that honours those very dead, a symbol of the courage and fortitude displayed in battle for the self-determination of the South - a valour that, they say, redeems the stain on the Confederate banner that slavery represents.
For others, such as state house speaker Robert Clark (72), a veteran black legislator in a state where a third of voters are African-American, the blue cross of St Andrew with its white stars - the Confederate emblem - can never be anything other than a symbol of slavery. "You can't separate the two," he says. "No, never." He speaks with feeling of his great-grandparents, "marched from Selma, Alabama, to Ebenezer, Mississippi, to be sold as slaves . . . That flag tells me they are still honouring a time when my other great grandmother was stood upon a chopping block and sold as a slave. And she had long teeth on the side, and what they did was they, like, filed her teeth down so she'd look better on the chopping block.
"My grandfather, who I remember, was 11 years old at Emancipation. He had never had a pair of shoes on his feet. He had never worn a pair of pants. He wore a little dress they made out of a cotton sack. He had never eaten off a plate. They'd eat their slop out of a trough like they were pigs . . . He lived long enough to tell me that. So that's what that symbol means to me." Such an "emblem of oppression" should simply not be hanging over state buildings representing all the people.
Those who wish to honour the Confederate dead and cherish that symbol have a right to do so, he says, but it must be by other means.
Legislation attached to the referendum bill will provide guarantees that such symbols may hang at historic sites. That a referendum is being held at this time reflects in part chance, in part the cowardice of the state's legislature. Last May, the state Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the general assumption, the state had no flag. Legal provisions enshrining the status of the contentious 1894 flag had inadvertently been deleted in 1906.
Faced with demands that the old flag should be legitimised, a prospect that would have brought the state seriously unwelcome publicity, the governor came up with a commission, the members of which, following a series of stormy public meetings, endorsed a version to replace the cross with 20 stars in a circle to symbolise Mississippi's admission as 20th state to the Union. Nervous legislators, many of whom admit they just want the issue to go away, then passed the buck to the electorate to decide between two versions. It's touch and go, with the only reliable poll so far showing the supporters of the old flag to have the edge.
"We'll win," says Stewart, "because people don't like it when they catch politicians sneaking around the back. They know they are going to lose - they've already given up."
Not so, says Blake Wilson, the head of the Mississippi Economic Council (chamber of commerce) whose organisation is co-ordinating the admittedly low-key campaign for the new flag, a grass-roots movement of neighbourhood canvassing supported by the main churches, businesses and - half-heartedly - by the state's elected officials and the majority of politicians, who have left the effort to others. "It is winnable," he insists.