South Carolina lawmakers compromised in 2000 by moving the Confederate battle flag off the top of the capitol dome and installing another version a few hundred feet away at the memorial to Rebel war dead.
Fourteen years ago, after nearly a decade of venomous debate and threats of economic boycotts, the South Carolina legislature compromised and removed the Confederate battle flag from atop the capitol dome in Columbia. To replace the familiar
rectangular flag with its
saltire, the lawmakers voted to put a
smaller square version—originally the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—on the statehouse grounds near a memorial to Confederate war dead. Foes said that made the flag even more prominent than before. Now the Democratic candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, Vincent Sheheen and Bakari Sellers, respectively,
want the flag removed from statehouse grounds completely.
The rectangular flag, which never officially represented the Rebel states, ultimately became the Confederate flag in the minds of most Americans starting when the Ku Klux Klan-adoring film Birth of a Nation gave it prominence in 1915. It's the flag now seen on everything from bumper stickers to belt buckles and, if you're Ted Nugent or some equally disturbed yahoo, your shirt.
Many supporters of flying the flag say it's not a racist, treasonous emblem but merely a paean to Southern "heritage and pride" that shouldn't remind anyone of the Confederate cause of slavery and post-Civil War oppression of African Americans under Jim Crow. Which is baloney.
In the 1950s, as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the Supreme Court and of the growing impact of the civil rights movement, some Southern states, including South Carolina, became stubborn defenders of official displays of the rectangular battle flag as a means of flipping the bird at the national effort to enforce the equality enshrined in the Constitution with the post-Civil War amendments ending slavery and mandating voting rights previously denied to black Americans. The Confederate flag wasn't placed on the South Carolina capitol dome until 1962.
In 2000, neither foes or backers wanted to bend even though avid supporters of flying the flag over the dome agreed the practice might be hurting tourism and other business by giving the impression that South Carolina was still mired in mythologizing the "Lost Cause." Vast numbers of businesses and religious leaders argued for removal on both moral and economic grounds. The NAACP, which had fought to get the flag removed since 1994, didn't like the idea of simply moving it to a different but still prominent spot on the grounds. But the compromise seemed the only way to get action, so the organization and black lawmakers went along with it. But Sheheen and Sellers are making a campaign issue this year out of the flag where it now flies by official fiat on public land:
“We are a state that is too often divided, too often separated by race, by region, by party,” Sheheen said. “We know that state leaders in South Carolina keep us entrenched in these divisions so they can stay entrenched in South Carolina.” [...]
Sheheen has never introduced legislation to remove the flag, but said in his 2010 gubernatorial run that he wanted lawmakers to discuss removing it. It’s an effort best led by a governor, Sheheen said Wednesday, when asked by The State about his legislative record.
The Republican candidates, meanwhile, view the flag removal as a non-issue, or last century's issue. It
would be last century's issue if the flag weren't still flying on taxpayers' property. Thanks to the resistance of those South Carolinians still living in the past, it remains in a place of honor, a strange perch in the 21st Century for the banner of slavery, secession and sedition. Taking down that embarrassment would be a good way to convince everyone that South Carolina is more interested in building its future than symbolically vindicating its past.
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