After more than fifty years the Confederate Flag no longer flies outside the South Carolina state house. Other vestiges of the Civil War-era South are unlikely to vanish so soon. The Navy Jack began to pop up everywhere from Ku Klux Klan rallies to Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts. “What if (Dylann Roof) had been posing with an American flag?” The Mississippi flag includes the rebel battle flag, and Georgia’s incorporates another Confederate design.
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“We were never contacted”, Ogle said of the letter that also was emailed to news outlets.
The 21-year-old white gunman reportedly revered the Confederate flag as a symbol of white supremacy.
Raging protesters came to his shop last week to demand the removal of the flag.
The flag came down Friday without incident, in a 6-minute ceremony, amid a crowd of up to 10,000 people chanting “USA, USA”, and “hey, hey, hey, goodbye”. “Everybody knew what we were doing”. They try to make us the villain.
With Thursday’s decision in South Carolina and the U.S. House of Representatives proposal to limit the Confederate flag’s use in National Park Service-run cemeteries, that Confederate flag faces retirement from the public sphere.
The Republican representing Greenwood and Laurens counties has even proposed placing a Bonnie Blue secession flag on the monument instead of removing the flag pole entirely. The murders of nine African-Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston made the presence of that particular flag morally untenable.
South Carolina’s leaders first flew the battle flag over the Statehouse dome in 1961 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. briefly discussed the matter Friday.
An honor guard from the South Carolina Highway patrol lowers the Confederate battle flag as it is removed from the Capitol grounds Friday, July 10, 2015, in Columbia, S.C.
The NCAA also put economic sanctions in place against the state in 2001, not allowing it to host any pre-selected tournaments.
The head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Charles Kelly Barrow, issued a statement on Thursday saying he was “dismayed” by the law’s signing, describing it as a “politically convenient insult to the legacy of millions of South Carolinians”.
Other efforts to change the flag failed, including in 1993 when then-Gov. I was told by a Croatian that the coastal region associates this symbol with being from the southern portion of the country and distinguishes them from the mountainous regions to the north around the capita of Zagreb.
But most Democrats say they don’t seem to be desirous about such talks.
As an undergraduate student in Louisiana in the 1950’s, Gaines said he encountered segregation for the first time.
Sanford pointed to his home state’s “speedy but deliberative” effort to take down the flag, but was reluctant to broaden the debate to try to legislate a ban on statues. Some view the banner as a symbol of slavery, while others consider it an emblem of Southern heritage.
David Beasley, the last Republican governor who took on the Confederate flag, which had fluttered in front of the 19th-century capitol building for 54 years, in 1996 “lost his job”, noted Politico, an influential Washington news site, but “Nikki Haley may get a promotion”. Among them was Yvonne Pygatt, a retired social worker and a cousin of Myra Thompson, who was killed in the church shooting.
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“We are still looking at it to see if we can find who did it”, Bankhead contended. “Maybe people will change their hearts”.
