Drive to call time on Confederate flag sweeps south – 150 years after civil war

The Confederate battle flag planted in the ground outside the statehouse in South Carolina has been protected by a state law since 2000 that says it must remain hoisted at 30 feet in perpetuity. Perpetuity, it turns out, might end next week.

State legislators introduced a bill on Tuesday to reverse the old law and remove the flag, following days of impassioned protests outside the capitol by thousands of citizens galvanized by the killing a week earlier of nine African Americans inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston.

Decades of resistance to retiring the emblem, which has long been held up in the south as a symbol of regional pride and reverence for fallen Confederate soldiers, suddenly seemed to disappear this week in revulsion at pictures posted online of the alleged church killer, Dylann Roof, with the flag.

This feeling was not restricted to South Carolina. The killings have sparked a quickly expanding movement to abolish the flag symbol across the states of the old south, which fought unsuccessfully to leave the United States in the civil war of 1861-65.

Multiple states have acted to remove the flag from official use, while retailers have announced bans on its sale and elected officials have spoken openly against it for the first time in memory.

“I think this is very, very encouraging, and I’m shocked at how quickly it happened, but I’m very glad it has,” said Heidi Beirich, director of intelligence projects at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I actually think that maybe finally, people who perhaps weren’t partisans for the flag but who were willing for example to pander for votes with people who liked that flag, have realized that this is just wrong. And that worship of that flag leads to situations like what happened in Charleston. It’s been that benign indifference that has allowed these symbols to stay up.”

The speed with which the opposition emerged could be tracked in public statements about the flag by the South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, who on Friday said that it would be up to the state legislature to decide how to handle the emblem.

By Monday, Haley was appearing before cameras alongside dozens of current and former state legislators to declare that the flag must come down.

“We are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it’s time to remove the flag from the capitol grounds,” Haley said. “One hundred and fifty years after the end of the civil war, the time has come.”

Opponents of the flag in South Carolina, who have argued that it is not a symbol of heritage but of hatred, have tried before – and failed – to remove it from the capitol grounds. In 1999, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized a tourism boycott of the state to demand that the flag be removed from its place at the time atop the capitol dome. White legislators had installed it atop the dome in 1962 as a gesture of defiance against forced racial desegregation.

The flag was removed from the dome, but replanted about 200 feet away, at a memorial to Confederate soldiers. It was an imperfect compromise on a deeply divisive issue, recalled the former South Carolina governor Jim Hodges, a Democrat who signed the flag’s relocation into law.

“In 1999, people had strong feelings, but the discussion was not in the context of an act of violence like this,” Hodges told the Guardian. “And that [the Charleston shooting] clearly added an impetus to try to address the problem.

“There is a moment in history here where things can happen, but it needs to happen pretty quick. There’s a lot of momentum to trying to resolve the issue. I do think that it will happen, and I would anticipate that it will happen within the next four to five days.

“This is the one ray of hope in an otherwise awful week.”

Lawmakers in other states this week followed South Carolina’s lead, with the Mississippi legislature saying it would consider legislation to remove the Confederate pattern from its state flag. Mississippi is the sole state to feature the pattern on its flag, although five other state flags incorporate symbolic tributes to the civil war battle flag.

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In Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe ordered the pattern removed from license plates in the state. “As Governor Haley said yesterday, her state can ill afford to let this symbol continue to divide the people of South Carolina,” McAuliffe said on Tuesday. “I believe the same is true here in Virginia.”

McAuliffe cited a supreme court ruling last week, a day after the shootings, which found that Texas did not have to allow the Confederate flag on license plates, judging that vehicle tags are a form of government speech, not free speech. The ruling saw an extremely rare break by Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African American justice on the court, with the conservative bloc of judges.

The governors of Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland and North Carolina followed suit on Friday, saying they would remove the Confederate flag from vehicle tags in their states.

The flag is disappearing from store shelves as well, with Walmart, eBay and Sears Holdings, which owns Sears and Kmart, all announcing they would no longer sell merchandise such as T-shirts, license plates or belt buckles bearing the flag. The online retail giant Amazon.com on Tuesday said it was pulling Confederate flag merchandise from its site, as the prominent US flag maker Valley Forge Flag prepared to stop producing and selling the flag.

The uprising against the Confederate flag has expanded to include other symbols of the army that fought to protect slavery in the United States. In Tennessee, lawmakers demanded that a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, be removed from the statehouse. Students at the University of Texas at Austin called for the removal of a campus statue honouring Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. Another campus statue, of Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, was decorated with a new message in spray paint overnight on Monday: “Black Lives Matter.”

Where lawmakers were showing willingness to take on the symbol claimed by the Charleston killer, however, they had not moved against the tool that made his hatred fatal. A day after the church killings, Barack Obama called on the nation to face its epidemic of gun violence.

“At some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively,” Obama said at the White House.

The call has not been taken up by other lawmakers, and the president has ceased repeating it.