Center in Atlanta on Thursday, and police and federal authorities were investigating.
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“Our groundsmen were so upset, they took pictures and then they moved them”, Jones said.
Officials removed the flags and are keeping them as evidence.
Atlanta’s Police chief said investigators are reviewing surveillance footage to see who is responsible for leaving the flags, a gesture a church leader said was, “clearly not about heritage, but about hate”.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church near the center, said Thursday at a news conference hours after the flags were found: “It is a hateful act”.
One of the flags was placed underneath a sign in the window of Ebenezer Baptist – a historic black church where King once preached – that reads, “Black Lives Matter”.
Dylann Roof, the white man who fatally shot nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, posted photos online posing with Confederate flags.
The campus includes King’s boyhood home and the church where King and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., were pastors.
As soon as church leaders found out, they immediately contacted police.
On July 9, the South Carolina House of Representatives approved taking down the flag from Capitol grounds after the state legislature passed legislation 94-20. “I view it as an effort to intimidate us in some way, and we will not be intimidated”, he said at a press conference. Nearby is the Martin Luther King Jr.
“It is a hateful act”, he says.
Confederate flags have been placed at the King Center before. He said he doesn’t know their ages, and he didn’t give other details. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and all of those buildings are just a short walk from the home of King’s grandparents, where he lived for the first 12 years of his life.
“Obviously, by placing the Confederate flags on this historical site, there is no way that we can not classify this as a hate crime”.
“It was disturbing and sickening but, unfortunately, not very surprising”.
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“Let the message go out that we will not be shaken by this”, Warnock said.
