While she didn’t speak, she nodded and smiled in the direction of the crowd after someone shouted: “Thank you governor”.
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The same state Highway Patrol color guard that took down the flag escorted Pinckney’s casket to lay at rest inside the State House last month. The flag was discovered missing about 11 a.m., said Bankhead, who added that an investigation into the theft is ongoing.
President Barack Obama tweeted minutes after the flag was down, saying it was “a sign of good will and healing and a meaningful step towards a better future”.
The flag is coming down 23 days after the massacre of state Sen. Among the slain were Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a widely admired state senator.
“I’m thinking of those nine people today”, Ms Haley said, referring to the nine men and women gunned down at Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal church.
South Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill early on Thursday to remove the flag.
“The tragedy was a tragedy”. “This decision will make South Carolina more welcoming and affirming of all people irrespective of their skin color”. It will become a part of the collection of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. At the base of the Statehouse’s Confederate monument, the rebel flag had flown atop a pole since it was moved there from the Statehouse dome in a 2000 compromise.
Heightened civil rights attention and debate followed the June 17th shooting in Charleston, where prosecutors have charged Dylann Roof with the murder of nine churchgoers.
The flag issue has ignited fierce passion on both sides, from those who say it honors Southern heritage and sacrifice and those who call it an ugly symbol of racism and slavery.
In a 94-20 vote, lawmakers in South Carolina have chose to remove the Confederate flag from the Capitol Building and instead leave it on display at a nearby museum. Now, even that flagpole will be torn down, but no timetable is set on that. “I want you to understand that”, said Jack Ferguson, Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau.
It was clear that they and other African-Americans saw removing the flag from the State House as a hollow victory.
He says he feels betrayed by his state leaders.
The hundreds who gathered to watch and cheer were joined by dozens people carrying Confederate flags, but the ceremony was a peaceful affair of competing demonstrations. An officer then presented it to a state archivist.
Still, some were not celebrating.
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It appears that some people who went to Saskatchewan’s Craven Country Jamboree are lagging behind the times when it comes to the Confederate flag. “I never thought in my lifetime, my personal lifetime, I’d ever see that happen”.
