South Carolina support for taking down the Confederate flag is growing
Jun 23, 2015, 7:04 AM | Updated: 10:04 am
For 15 years, South Carolina lawmakers refused to consider removing the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds, but opinions changed within five days of the massacre of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, as a growing tide of Republicans joined the call to remove the battle flag from a Confederate monument in front of the Statehouse and put it in a museum. (AP)
(AP)
It’s been called the “third rail” of South Carolina politics, but suddenly, it’s as if someone just cut off the electricity.
“This is a moment in which we can say that, that flag does not represent the future of our great state,” Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina said recently, joining what has become a chorus of conservative voices agreeing that the stars and bars have to go.
After last week’s massacre at Emanuel AME — carried out by a suspect who used the Confederate flag as his symbol — every flag at the Capitol in Charleston was lowered. Every flag except the Confederate flag in accordance with the peculiar law passed by the state Legislature.
After repeated calls, not just to lower that flag but to be rid of it altogether, it looks like that is finally going to happen. And what appears to have made the difference this time is that one of the nine victims, the pastor of Emanuel AME, was also a member of the state Legislature.
Republican State Representative Doug Brannon is sponsoring the bill to remove the flag from that flagpole on the Capitol grounds.
“The switch that flipped was the death of my friend, Senator Pinckney,” he said. “I’ve been in the House five years. I should have filed that bill five years ago. But the time is now.”
Governor Nikki Haley agrees, along with South Carolina Senator and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham.
“Now after the shooting, there’s just no way to keep the flag,” Senator Graham told the press. “I think it’s a roadblock to our future. Put it in a museum, move forward.”
Not everyone is on board. Paul Graham of the Sons of Confederate Veterans told the press that targeting the Confederate flag because of how one killer decided to use it is unfair.
“If I thought that this would change anything at all, I would personally be the first one to want to take it down,” Graham said. “But it will not change anything. What it will do is it will embarrass and shame people who had nothing to do with this event. Nothing!”
If it’s any consolation, the flag remains an option on license plates in South Carolina as it does in eight other states.
But it looks like South Carolina will be spared the spectacle of putting on trial a man who was trying to start a race war, while it flies the flag of an army that was fighting on the wrong side of a race war.
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