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African-American Confederate Flag Variants (U.S.)

Confederate Flag Variant 1
Nu South

See also:

Confederate Flag Variant 1

image by António Martins-Tuválkin, 6 November 2001

Two days ago in Oakland I spotted a car driven by an African-American man with an interesting flag in the spot where the front license plate would generally go: it was by pattern a rectangular "Confederate Battle Flag" but the colors were altered to be pan-African colors. The saltire was black, the stars and fimbriation for the saltire were green.
Josh Fruhlinger, 17 July 1998

This is the emblem of a company that makes clothes aimed at black American consumers. It appears on their clothing (along with the company's acronym below, which I don't recall), but it may have passed into common usage.
Nathan Lamm, 6 November 2001

Nu South

The NuSouth Apparel was a clothing company from Charleston, SC, whose logo, used as the conspicuous decoration of their products, was derived from the Confederate flag by replacing white and blue with green and black, respectively, thus displaying Garvey colors - a combination which might rightfully be called a vexillological oxymoron. The emblem actually predates the company, whose founders, Angel Quintero and Sherman Evans, created it in 1993 while running the recording company named Vertical Records, as a part of the promotion campaign for a local hip-hop group named DaPhlayva, with the idea of making a symbol which would express the group members' identity as the Afro-Americans from the South. The emblem, which added black-red-black vertical stripes to the hoist and fly edges of the flag, appeared on the cover of DaPhlayva's album "Phlayva 4 Dem All", as well as on the promotional T-shirts which were distributed during their concert. Shortly afterwards, wearing of these shirts was banned in a local high school, with one student being suspended for not respecting the ban (which she did in response to the lack of same reaction to the shirts with white racist messages). At that time, Quintero and Evans had produced a flag with this design and publicly displayed it before the South Carolina State House, proposing that it replace the Confederate flag, whose flying atop the building (it remained there until 2000) was becoming a heated topic at the time; the said flag is probably the one they were wrapped in while posing for the photo which was later published at the NuSouth website. On 2005-10-16, they sold numerous shirts with the emblem during the Million Man March, the large rally in Washington, D.C. This has initiated a growing demand for the clothing decorated like this, eventually resulting in the founding of the NuSouth company in 1997. The company name used the hip-hop style spelling of words "New South", but was also interpreted as "N-U-South", a same-style spelling of the words "In You, South", both expressing the wish to help creating a new, unified Southern identity, the symbol of which could be the described flag. The company website, online since early 2000 was closed down by the end of April 2003. Although the home page, which displayed only the company logo, actually remained until January 2009, NuSouth probably did not outlive the year 2003. While the logo went out of use with the changes of fashion, and the destiny of the produced flag is currently not known, still its existence was recorded enough to verify that it was not just a flagoid.

Two rarely used variants of the NuSouth logo were using Garvey colors in different patterns. One of them was replacing red, white and blue with black, red and green, respectively.

Confederate Flag Variant 2
image by Tomislav Todorovic, 19 October 2013

On the other one, red, white and blue were replaced with green, black and red, respectively.

Confederate Flag Variant 3
image by Tomislav Todorovic, 19 October 2013

Sources:
[1] Prince, K. Michael: Rally 'round the Flag, Boys!: South Carolina and the Confederate Flag University of South Carolina Press, 2004 Google Books preview available here: books.google.rs
[2] TheCabin.net website: thecabin.net/stories/051899/opi_0518990037.html
[3] KriPtiK website - cover of album "Phlayva 4 Dem All": kriptik.tistory.com/131
[4] AAME website - photo of Angel Quintero showing the NuSouth clothing in the store: www.inmotionaame.org
[5] NuSouth website at the Internet Archive - history of the venture, with a photo of the founders wrapped in the flag (saved on 2000-03-01, without images): www.nusouth.com/history.html
[6] NuSouth website at the Internet Archive - history of the venture, with a photo of the founders wrapped in the flag (saved on 2001-09-22): www.nusouth.com/history.html
[7] NuSouth website at the Internet Archive - home page (saved on 2003-04-19): www.nusouth.com

Tomislav Todorovic, 19 October 2013