It flew over hundreds of thousands of obscenities of horror. The rape of young slave women, fresh from Africa, held down and brutalized by white men.

Chaining. Branding. Mutilation. Castration. Hanging. Killing in dozens of ways.

The crushing of the spirit. The breaking of the body. The million cruelties of one person owning another

The preachers, most of them, said it was God's will, that the black man was "the son of Ham," doomed by the Bible to be a "hewer of wood and a drawer of water."

The flag flew over all that and more.

The courthouse in a sharecropper town where a black person had best get out of town by sundown. The country jail where the lynch mob went to get their victim. On a proud pole over the segregated cemeteries of the war dead. Over segregated schools where the teachers made the "negro children" pledge it every morning.

It flapped in the breeze over the white housing projects in South Boston, glowed on the shoulder patch of a cop doing a little nightstick work on some mouthy black kid on the South Side of Chicago.

It flew over the town hall in Pennsylvania where they wouldn't give you a license to wed a white man. It was on the mastheads of newspapers that didn't print "colored" wedding announcements or printed them on a separate page. It flew over the sunlit bowl of a baseball stadium where white men taunted Jackie Robinson.

And we would not back down from that flag. We saluted when it went by in a parade. We pledged it at the start of the City Council meetings. We put a tiny one on a stick next to every veteran's grave. We put it everywhere after 9/11. We threaten to stomp people who stomp that flag. We try, some of us, to endlessly amend to United Sates Constitution to protect that flag. We wear that flag on shirts, pants, hats, bikinis and underwear as a sign of our pride.

It flew over a "white man's country" and over the massacres of Native-Americans and it flew over the boys going ashore to be torn apart on Omaha Beach.

We played tug of war with it as it started to stand for civil rights, for women's rights, for gay rights, for the right to publish everything from unpopular political theories to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

The flag looked the same but it got bigger, it's promise covering more and more people, it's slow, flapping freedom shading more kinds of people from injustice.

The Confederate flag saw many, if not all of the same things but it could not change. Its nation vanished and that flag was forever constrained by its original limits. It could not get bigger, only smaller.

What we say we like best about the American flag is that it's meaning never changes, but we are wrong. The American flag, and what it means, is always getting bigger, extending the promise further.

Old Glory never really gets old.

Dion's latest book, "Marc Dion: Vol. I," is a collection of his best 2014 columns and is available for Nook and Kindle. To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit WWW.CREATORS.COM.