Remove battle flag, Obama tells funeral
CHARLESTON, S.C. • Invoking scripture and song, U.S. President Barack Obama stood Friday before those grieving the deaths of nine black people slain in church and called on Americans to confront the “uncomfortable truths” of the racial prejudices that still infect American society.
Eulogizing Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor and legislator who was among those killed in the attack, Obama said it would be a betrayal of everything the man stood for “if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on.”
He pleaded with Americans not “to go back to business as usual.” The 40-minute eulogy greeted with shouts of “Amen!” applause and multiple standing ovations.
In it, the president spoke movingly of all that Pinckney had done in his life, then confronted the hard questions raised by his death and those of eight others slain by a white man.
He said it was time to remove the Confederate flag from American flagpoles, saying that action would “not be an insult to the valour of Confederate soldiers” but an acknowledgment that “the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong,” as was racial segregation and resistance to civil rights efforts.
Removing the flag, he said, “would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s
A modest balm for so many unhealed wounds
history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”
The president called, too, for an American reckoning with the nation’s history of gun violence, saying “for too long we’ve been blind to the mayhem that gun violence inflects upon this nation.”
He closed his rousing address by singing the words to the famous Christian hymn Amazing Grace, and calling on Americans not to “lose our way again” by failing to reckon with the questions stirred in the past week.
The deaths of Pinckney and eight others sparked spirited debate in Southern states over the Confederate battle flag, which for years has flown at a monument on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse. But the slayings have also exposed the scant appetite in Washington for restarting discussions on gun control legislation, which have made no progress during Obama’s presidency.
In Georgia, Democrats are calling for an end to state holidays commemorating Confederate history, joining a push across the country to remove the battle flag and other symbols from government buildings.
State Sen. Vincent Fort said he is drafting legislation to prevent any Confederate holidays in Georgia. The state celebrates Confederate Memorial Day, on a date determined by the governor to mark the end of the Civil War in Georgia. and Confederate History Month.