South Carolina Votes to Remove Confederate Flag From Capitol
COLUMBIA, S.C., July 9 (UPI) — The South Carolina House of Representatives voted early Thursday to pass a bill that calls for the removal of the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds — a highly controversial issue aggravated by the shooting deaths of nine people at a historic black church last month.
The House passed the bill by a vote of 94-20, sending it to Gov. Nikki Haley‘s desk, where she has promised to sign it. The legislation will mandate the removal of all Confederate flags from the grounds.
“The House of Representatives has served the state of South Carolina and her people with great dignity. I’m grateful for their service and their compassion,” Haley said via her Facebook page after the bill passed. “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of, a day that truly brings us all together as we continue to heal, as one people and one state.”
Haley is expected to formally approve the legislation Thursday. If she does, the bill stipulates that the flags must come down and be moved to a relic room within 24 hours after her signature is first affixed to it, various news media reported.
The South Carolina Senate passed the legislation earlier this week.
The bill’s passage followed 13 hours of debate on the topic, which has long been a hot-button issue in the United States due to the belief by some that the flag is a symbol of segregation.
After last month’s shootings that killed nine black worshipers at a church in Charleston, photographs of the accused gunman, who is also an accused segregationist, surfaced online prominently featuring the Confederate flag.
The Confederate flag has flown at the South Carolina Capitol since 1961, when the state raised it as a way to honor the 100th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. However, some critics believe it was secretly a show of defiance amid the emerging civil rights movement.
In 1962, the state officially mandated that the flag be flown at the Capitol permanently — and it has ever since. In 2001, Time magazine called it a “a states’-rights rebuff to desegregation.” Yale University law Professor James Forman, Jr. asserted 24 years ago that it was largely common knowledge what the flag really stood for.
“The Confederate flag symbolizes more than the Civil War and the slavery era,” he wrote in a 1991 law journal titled “Driving Dixie Down: Removing the Confederate Flag from Southern State Capitols.”
“The flag has been adopted knowingly and consciously by government officials seeking to assert their commitment to black subordination,” it stated.
In view of the Charleston church shooting, however, the flag’s presence at government properties nationwide has taken a vicious beating.
“The alleged killer of the Charleston nine used that flag as a symbol of hatred and bigotry and racism,” Democratic South Carolina Sen. Joel Lourie said Monday during the chamber’s passage of the bill.
Three weeks ago, Alabama Gov. Robert J. Bentley ordered the removal of the so-called “Rebel Flag” from the state’s Capitol grounds in Montgomery. Other images that contain Confederate elements, such as Mississippi’s state flag and statues of Confederate leaders, are also spurring calls for their removal at state and federal buildings.
The flag is disappearing from other venues, as well. Retailers Walmart and Amazon recently announced the pulling of all items that bear the Confederate mark — and TV Land recently announced it would pull The Dukes of Hazzard off its schedule. The network didn’t give a reason for the show’s removal, but one of the program’s signature elements is a bright orange 1969 Dodge Charger, known as the General Lee, which features the Confederate flag painted on its roof.
