Dan Carsen of member station WBHM in Birmingham tells our Newscast unit that Bentley said he didn’t want the flags to become a distractionas Alabama grapples with issues including a massive budget deficit.
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The Confederate battle flag flies at a Confederate war memorial on the grounds of Alabama state capitol in Montgomery on February 26, 2009. On Wednesday, Alibaba also announced that it will remove the Confederate flag and all products designed with it from their shelves. She called on lawmakers, whose legislative year wraps up this week, to address the issue over the summer and said she would order a special session if they did not.
For those who don’t understand the meaning behind the Confederate flag, it is a symbol of the slave-holding South. Many people few the flag as a negative symbol due to last week’s church shooting involving gunman Dylann Roof. Roof had outfitted his auto with Confederate plates and had posed in pictures with the flag which is widely seen as a symbol of racism. Once those flags were removed, workers proceeded to remove other Civil War-era flags.
The removal comes just a day after South Carolina lawmakers agreed to debate whether the Confederate battle flag should be removed from Statehouse grounds.
One metro Detroit native who’s been known to sport T-shirts featuring the Confederate flag is “Motor City Madman” musician Ted Nugent.
The Confederate flag used to fly over the Alabama Capitol, following a 1963 order from ex- Gov. George C. Wallace during a fight with the federal government over ending school segregation.
Pinckney, a fourth-generation pastor, began preaching at 13, and at 23 became the youngest African-American in South Carolina history to be elected to the state legislature.
The crowd heard prayers offered in the memory of State Senator Clementa Pinckney, a longtime advocate of the flag’s removal. For many black people, the Confederate flag is a symbol of hate that belongs in a museum, not on statehouse grounds.
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Reggie VandenBosch, vice president of sales at privately owned Valley Forge Flag, said the Pennsylvania-based company came to the decision as pressure grew on South Carolina to remove the banner from outside the State House in Columbia.
