US protesters call for removal of Confederate flag in South Carolina
Hundreds of Americans have rallied at the South Carolina State House to demand that the Confederate flag be removed from the grounds following the massacre of nine African-Americans by a white gunman who had posed with the flag.
Chanting "Bring it down" and "Take it down," protesters gathered on Tuesday in the sweltering summer heat in Columbia, South Carolina to protest the flying of the Confederate flag, a controversial symbol of the Confederate slave states that existed from 1861 to 1865.
The Confederate States of America was an unrecognized confederation of secessionist US states whose regional economy was mostly dependent upon agriculture, which in turn largely relied upon the labor of black slaves.
The protesters pushed for state lawmakers to follow a call by Governor Nikki Haley to remove the flag after 21-year-old Dylann Roof slaughtered nine African-American worshipers, including a state senator, at a church in Charleston last week.
Across the nation there has been a growing outcry for the flag to be removed since Roof, who is a white supremacist, appeared in photos holding Confederate flags and burning or desecrating US flags.
"Talk has been had, we don't need any more talking," said Nelson Rivers of the National Action Network, one of the speakers. "All the points have been made. The governor has spoken. The flag ought to come down."
"It's time for South Carolina to get past its history," said J. Elliott Summey, president of the Charleston County Council. "History belongs in a place. It belongs in a museum, not on sovereign ground."
The protest came a day after Governor Haley called on state legislators to vote to remove the flag from the state house grounds in Columbia.
The Confederate battle flag was first raised atop the South Carolina State House in 1962, as part of the US Civil War centennial commemoration, where it remained until 2000 despite persistent protest from civil rights groups.
That year a political compromise led to the flag being removed from the State House’s dome and another raised on a 30-foot flagpole at the Confederate Soldier Monument in front of the State House.
US Senator Rand Paul also weighed in Tuesday on the controversy surrounding the flag, saying it was “time to put it in a museum” during a radio interview.
“I think the flag is inescapably a symbol of human bondage and slavery, and particularly when people use it obviously for murder and to justify hatred so vicious that you would kill somebody I think that symbolism needs to end, and I think South Carolina is doing the right thing,” Paul, the Kentucky Republican and presidential candidate, said in an interview with Jeff Kuhner on WRKO in Boston.
AHT/GJH
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