Up until June of this year, Greg Reese of Campton, Kentucky, proudly featured a Confederate flag magnet on the trunk of his car.

But after a series of realizations, including the police killing of George Floyd, Reese removed the magnet and created a new decal—one that read “Rednecks for Black Lives.” The bumper sticker he designed features a new inclusive, and colorful, Southern pride flag.

Although he says it took him a while to admit the problem, he now feels “disgust” at ever flying the Confederate flag.

“Some of us still are in the dark or want to stay in the dark about [the Confederate flag],” he says. “And it was an icon growing up as a child. You saw it everywhere.”

He started a Facebook group to engage people to join the movement. He also connected with Southern Crossroads, a group of self-described hillbilly rednecks from Kentucky, in order to educate himself and others.

“You can sit back and say, you know, ‘Hey, this ain’t my fight.’ And a lot of us did for a long time,” he says. “But I want to be one of those out there pulling people into it because it is their fight. It always has been our fight. South, North, White, Black, Brown, Latinos—everyone needs to get in this.”

“We need to educate people and teach the people that I know and the people that they know that will join my group, Rednecks for Black Lives on Facebook. I’m trying to teach them all these little things that honestly, yeah, we probably should have known a lot of this stuff. There’s a lot of people saying, like all lives matter and all this stuff and they don’t understand what they’re saying. They don’t understand that the issue is not really even Black and White. The issue is the haves and the have nots. The people at the top keeping us down. People of color are being treated far worse than us and that’s another dividing tactic.”

Read the full interview at www.wbur.org