In August 1965, two powerful men in the state of Alabama met face-to-face for the first time. The first was George Corley Wallace, the bulldog-faced governor who had famously stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in a vain attempt to keep the school segregated in 1963. The other one was Bill France Sr., the Washington, D.C., native responsible for bulldogging the wild kingdom of stock-car racing into the money machine that would come to be known as NASCAR. France was building what he called a “super-speedway” in Talladega, and Wallace promised to do everything he could to make that project succeed — including accelerating the construction of Interstate 20, the major highway leading to the track. Three years later, Wallace first ran for president with France Sr. as a prominent backer. A backlash was rising against the achievements of the civil rights movement and Wallace, with his wolverine’s instinct, sensed that in many ways the entire country was Southern. (On the Republican side, Richard Nixon saw it, too, concocting his “Southern Strategy,” which realigned the country in a fashion that persists to this day.) France was a prominent backer of the governor’s run, raising money and telling an interviewer, “George Washington founded this country, and George Wallace will save it.” And thus the political power still present in the aftermath of American apartheid found some expression in the rise of Bill France’s NASCAR. They were inseparable.

So it was more than simply window dressing last week when Brian France, the current NASCAR CEO and the grandson of Bill France Sr., responding to a national revulsion regarding the Confederate battle flag occasioned by the massacre of nine people in a South Carolina church by a white supremacist, announced that the flag would no longer be welcome at NASCAR events. Even more than the decision by Walmart to discontinue sales of related merchandise, and even more than the call by South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to remove the banner from the state capitol grounds, France’s move struck deeply not only into the culture that had produced reverence for the emblem of sedition, but also at NASCAR itself. And France was not shy about saying why.

We want to go as far as we can to eliminate the presence of that flag … I personally find it an offensive symbol, so there is no daylight how we feel about it and our sensitivity to others who feel the same way. We’re working with the industry to see how far we can go to get that flag to be disassociated entirely from our events.

This is not going to be an easy task. It’s simple enough for NASCAR to police itself in this regard, but the flag can be almost omnipresent in the infield at most of France’s racetracks and atop the vast flocks of recreational vehicles that travel from event to event, like elements of an army. But France promised that he was not going to relent. “If there’s more we can do to disassociate ourselves with that flag at our events than we’ve already done, then we want to do it,” he said. “We are going to be as aggressive as we can.” France’s position was reinforced last weekend by driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., the scion of a legendary racing family that traces its participation all the way back to the original circuit, when Ralph Earnhardt was one of Bill France Sr.’s most prominent drivers. “I think it’s offensive to an entire race,” Earnhardt said. “It belongs in the history books and that’s about it.”

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