‘It’s time to move the flag from the capitol’
In wake of church shooting, South Carolina confronts ‘deeply offensive symbol of a brutally racist past’
COLUMBIA, S.C.— South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Monday called for removal of a Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds, taking sides on an emotional issue, after the white man accused of killing nine black people was seen brandishing that flag in widely circulated pictures.
Haley, a Republican, had avoided ad- dressing the question in the days after the mass shooting last Wednesday at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, a crime that rocked this state and prompted renewed calls to remove a flag that has often been embraced by racists.
“It’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds,” the governor said, speaking to reporters at the capitol in Columbia.
The flag has flown in front of the state capitol for 15 years after being moved from atop the State House dome, where it first flew in 1962. The flag was carried by forces supporting the pro-slavery, secessionist Southern states in the 1861-65 American Civil War.
While Haley said residents have the right to show the Confederate battle flag on private property, “the State House is different, and the events of this past week call upon us to look at this in a different way.”
The governor spoke shortly after the White House announced that President Barack Obama would travel to Charleston on Friday to memorialize the church shooting victims and deliver the eulogy at the funeral services for slain pastor Rev. Clementa Pinckney who was also a state senator.
While many in the state consider the flag to be a symbol of the state’s heritage, Haley said, “for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally racist past.”
The issue of the flag has bedevilled South Carolina for decades. In 2000, state officials, pressured by a business boycott led by the NAACP and large protests in Columbia, decided that only the American and South Carolina flags would fly above the State House, while the Confederate battle flag would be placed in front of the building.
Banishing the flag from the capitol grounds — at least any time soon — may be harder than winning over the governor.
This year’s regular session of the General Assembly has ended, and although it will meet again in a special session beginning Tuesday, the resolution authorizing that session limits it to discussion of certain matters. Lawmakers said Monday that amending the resolution to add the flag to the agenda would require a two-thirds vote of both houses.
The conservative politicians who have led South Carolina for a quarter-century have rebuffed many previous calls to remove the flag.
The last governor to take this political risk, Republican David Beasley, was hounded out of office in 1998 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, effectively ending his political career.
The Confederate heritage group announced Monday that it will vigorously fight any effort to remove the flag now. Earlier in the day, opponents of the flag demanded its removal and invoked the memories of those killed at the Charleston church, including Pinckney.
“What better way to honour the late Rev. and Sen. Clementa Pinckney and those who were killed by someone who adored the Confederate battle flag and thought it to be symbolic of white supremacy and hate,” said the Rev. Nelson Rivers III, pastor of Charity Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston.
“Our friend and brother Sen. Pinckney should not lie in state in the shadow of a flag whose meaning apparently motivated a killer to take his life,” Rivers said, adding, “The time has come for the General Assembly to do what it ought to have done a long time ago, which is to remove this symbol of divisiveness and even terrorism to some.”
A growing number of religious and political leaders said they would push for the flag’s removal Tuesday during a rally in the Capitol. Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. said that while the battle flag might be a symbol of nothing more than Southern pride to some people, it had a much darker meaning to many others.
“When it is so often used as a symbol of hate,” he said, “of defiance to civil rights, to equal rights, equality among the races, a symbol used by the Klan, a symbol you saw at every protest event during times of integration and racial progress, then, in front of the state capitol, for those who harbour any of those kinds of feelings — and we hope they are very few — it nonetheless sends the wrong kind of message.”
The debate over the flag has been revived as thousands of people converged on Charleston to show their solidarity with the victims and join a mix of rallies, marches and funerals. Bells tolled across Charleston Sunday as the historic church known as “Mother Emanuel” reopened.
Thousands marched later Sunday on the city’s iconic Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, a three-kilometre span with towering cable supports that is named after a former state lawmaker and vocal Confederate flag supporter. It is one of many symbols of white power that remain in South Carolina and can’t easily be changed because of the flag deal.
Dylann Roof, 21, has been charged with nine counts of murder in the shooting on Wednesday at a Bible study meeting at Emanuel AME Church, one of the oldest and most prominent black congregations in the South.
Friends say Roof had voiced hatred of black people and white supremacist ideology — which are also expressed on a website registered in his name — and a desire to start a race war.
He has been quoted as telling his victims that he had to kill black people because they were taking over.
Photos online show Roof displaying the best known of the battle flags used by Confederate armies during the Civil War, and also the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.