The occupants of the Old Burial Ground have seen their share of conflict and dissent, and it looks like a new round is about to open above them.
Over the last several weeks, the Southborough Historical Commission (which I head) has received a number of complaints about the flags flying in the old burial ground.
A little background: at some point in the 1990’s, a group of veterans decided it would be appropriate to commemorate those who had served the fledgling United States with a special memorial. Later in 2002, a large plaque was added marking the death of the three men who died during combat. And at some point after that (the timeline is very unclear) six revolutionary-era battle flags were placed in a semi-circle at the entrance to the Old Burial Ground.
And that’s pretty much how it stood until recently when a number of residents contacted the Commission objecting to the fact that one of the flags flying was the Gadsden Flag, which over the last decade has recently been co-opted by various White Supremacists groups (You can read more about that HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. The trigger, I am guessing, was the very prominent and disgraceful role that the Gadsden flag played in the recent Capital Hill riots. 
In response to these complaints the SHC decided to do a little investigating in preparation for a report to the Board of Selectmen, who have ultimate say in this matter.
The flags currently flying are these:
Of these, only two have anything vaguely to do with the veterans buried there, and the most relevant flag, the Continental Colors flag hoisted by George Washington in Cambridge 1775 , is not flying at all.The other issue, and to my eyes, equally relevant, is that these six small flags are impaling the unmarked gravesites below. When this monument was conceived in the 1990s, a ground-radar survey hadn’t yet been conducted by the Society, which proved conclusively that this area is full of active burials, whose headstones were shattered or lost during the 1938 hurricane.
>So at this point, it seemed a prudent move to reconsider the whole matter, and the Historical Commission voted 6-0 last week to send the following letter to the Board of Selectmen:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
As we have already alerted you, the Historical Commission has received complaints about the choice of flags flying the Old Burial Ground. Particularly egregious to many are the two variants of the Gadsden flag, which was designed by a slave owning South Carolinian and has become linked to white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan. These associations are not new; many date back to the 1960s. You may also wish to read this recent article in the Miami Herald by Harvard Professor Noah Feldman noting that the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has called for “a careful investigation to see whether recent uses of the flag have been sufficiently “racially tinged” that it could count as harassment.”