[color="DarkRed"]Belmont Street neighbors support protesters who covered up flags with Martin Luther King Jr.'s image; owners call it vandalism

Friday, June 27, 2008
The Oregonian Staff
To folks in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Southeast Portland, Dixie Mattress Co. represents one of the city's enduring mysteries.

What actual business goes on behind those iron bars and dusty windows? What would inspire anyone, let alone a small-business owner in ultra-liberal Portland, to keep a sign featuring two Confederate battle flags hanging out front for the whole world to see -- and judge?

The answers are hard to come by.

The shop's owners, sisters Judy Perronne and Denise Woodward, don't attend meetings of the Belmont Business Association. The head of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association said he's never spoken to them.

Their store sits in the heart of the business district, but the only times they seem to surface are when controversy forces them out -- like earlier this week, when someone came by in the middle of the night and covered up the rebel flags with big tin signs depicting Martin Luther King Jr. with the inscription "I Have a Dream."

They've been targeted by graffiti artists before, like many Belmont businesses, but never this kind of overt response.

"Whoever did this took their time," Perronne said. "They had to get up there. They had to measure the flags to make sure their things fit. They had to make them and then come back and put them up.

"Are you telling me nobody in this neighborhood saw anything? Nobody?"

As Perronne's reaction suggests, life inside Dixie Mattress can get lonely. Perronne and her sister, both solid women with silvering hair and working-class roots, regularly get offers for the two buildings they own on Belmont Street.

But at the moment, they have no interest in selling. Sticking it out as long as possible is a matter of principle to them, just like the flags.

"This is our business. This is our building," she said. "I'm proud of what we've built here."

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"I'm more Oregon now than I am Louisiana," said Perronne, who was 13 when her father brought the family west or, as she puts it, "moved us up north."

"The flag is not about race. When people do complain -- and this is America, that's your right -- I ask them where they're from. I tell them I was born in the South, and I'm proud of it. If you have a Union flag, you put that up. It won't bother me."

Although the sight of a Confederate flag might be shocking in Portland, the debate over the stars and bars in all its various forms continues to rage on the East Coast. Perronne's attitude -- "Heritage, not hate" -- is the same one used in recent years to justify putting the Confederate flag on Southern license plates, keeping it hanging over state capitols and allowing students to wave it at football games.

"For some people, it has become a symbol -- in their mind -- of Southern culture and ethnicity. They've just blocked out everything else it's associated with," said Gaines Foster, head of the history department at Louisiana State University. "The other thing the flag stands for, for some people, is this notion that, 'Hell no, you can't tell me what to do.' "