and delivered the eulogy at Rev. Pinckney’s memorial. As for Dylann Roof’s hopes for a race war, Obama called the massacre “an act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways,” Obama continued. “God has different ideas. He didn’t know he was being used by God. Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Rev. Pinckney and that Bible study group.”
“We all have one thing in common. Our hearts are broken,” said Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. at an interfaith prayer service. Riley received a standing ovation at the service when another speaker recalled a 120-mile march to Columbia that Riley led in 2000 to demand the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds—a demand that was never fully met.
The Confederate flag had been hoisted over the South Carolina statehouse in 1962 on the orders of Governor Ernest Hollings, a Democrat, at the behest of the state legislature, as a protest against desegregation. Everyone knew what the flag stood for, and they weren’t afraid to say it: White power. Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Keep the niggers down.
By 2000, no one was willing to say that anymore. Defenders of the flag’s continued use relied on a set of euphemisms—“states’ rights,” “Southern heritage,” “regional identity”—for what they all knew was an abiding belief in white supremacy. The historian Gordon Rhea explains:
It is no accident that Confederate symbols have been the mainstay of white supremacist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the skinheads. They did not appropriate the Confederate battle flag simply because it was pretty. They picked it because it was the flag of a nation dedicated to their ideals: “that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Confederate flag, we are told, represents heritage, not hate. But why should we celebrate a heritage grounded in hate, a heritage whose self-avowed reason for existence was the exploitation and debasement of a sizeable segment of its population?
South Carolina’s display of the Confederate flag from atop its state-house dome was one of the more notorious examples of officialdom flaunting the symbol. The pressure remained intense to remove it from the grounds altogether, including boycotts of the state by both the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Finally, after the Charleston massacre, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, was suddenly faced with the need for major damage control. Haley and others knew that it was time to act. On June 22, five days after the massacre, she held a press conference. “Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will to say it’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds,” Haley said. The removal, she explained, was necessary to prevent the symbol from causing further pain.
Even some of the flag’s staunchest defenders conceded the need for change. “With the winds that started blowing last week, I figured it would just be a matter of time,” said Ken Thrasher of the South Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “Whatever the Legislature decides to do, we will accept it graciously.”
On June 23, the Assembly began to consider a measure to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds. On July 10, in a solemn ceremony, the flag was taken down for the last time.
Not just in South Carolina but all around the South, the Confederate flag seemed to have taken on a much clearer, and much darker, meaning, and many Southerners decided it was time to be done with it. Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama ordered the removal of the Confederate flag flying over the statehouse in Montgomery. Governors in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland announced that they would cease offering state license plates featuring the flag. Mississippi legislators vowed to remove the symbol permanently from their own state flag.
Retailers around the country, including Wal-Mart, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Sears, and Target, announced they would be pulling Confederate flags and related merchandise from their offerings. The largest flag manufacturers announced they were stopping their Confederate flag production line.
Monuments to the Confederacy and its heroes came under fire. In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered the removal of four statues, including the sixty-foot column in the heart of the city bearing the figure of General Robert E. Lee.
In Memphis, the city council voted to remove a memorial to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a famed Confederate leader and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
In pop culture, too, the flag was being banned. Warner Bros. announced it was ceasing production of its “General Lee” toy cars. As for real cars, NASCAR’s chairman announced the company would no longer sanction any use of the flag, and a number of prominent drivers, including Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon, publicly supported the move. NASCAR races are traditionally a favored location to fly the Confederate flag, but in early July, all NASCAR tracks issued a joint statement asking for fans to refrain from flying or waving the Confederate flag at races.
Official proscriptions of the flag were one thing—reality on the ground, another. As the weeks went by, NASCAR’s order was increasingly ignored. More and more Confederate flags started appearing in the stands. At the Coke Zero 400 in Florida on July 6, held at Daytona International Speedway, thousands of fans showed up with Confederate flags. Most of them angrily denounced NASCAR’s “political correctness.”
“NASCAR is too quick to try to be politically correct like everybody else,” said Paul Stevens, of Port Orange, Florida.
Another NASCAR fan, Steven Rebenstorf, said, “The Confederate flag has absolutely nothing to do with slavery. It has nothing to do with divisiveness. It has nothing to do with any of that. It was just a battle banner until the Ku Klux Klan draped it around themselves. Now, all of a sudden, it represents slavery and that’s not at all true.”
“It’s just a Southern pride thing,” Larry Reeves from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, told the Associated Press. “It’s nothing racist or anything.”
The backlash to the backlash grew in volume. On July 17, one week after the flag came down at the South Carolina statehouse, the Ku Klux Klan held a protest in Columbia to demand that it be restored. Several hundred KKK protesters were met by an even larger crowd of counterprotesters, including a number of radical New Black Panthers. Police had trouble keeping the two sides from tangling, and five people wound up being arrested. Confederate flags were everywhere.
And it turned out to be a lovely day to recruit new members to the Klan.
“We’re just trying to save our heritage,” Roy Pemberton, a sixty-two-year-old Klansman, told potential recruits he met at the rally, most of them middle-aged white men. Pemberton handed them business cards with the group’s hotline number and its slogan: “Racial Purity Is America’s Security!”
“If they continue … there will be a war, and we will fight for our heritage,” Pemberton said. “There are things the South will fight for, and that is one of them. If it continues, there will be bloodshed.”
The new backlash provided recruitment opportunities for the racist radical right, and not just the Klan.
Some of the most eager defenders of the flag were so-called neo-Confederates, far-right Southern ideologues who argue that the cause of the South was just, and agitate for modern-day secession. Two of their favorite organizations now leapt to the fore: the League of the South (LoS), an anti-black hate group, and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans (SCV), a formerly legitimate Southern-heritage group that in recent years has been hijacked by neo-Confederates. Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, defended the Confederate banner, declaring, “The Confederate battle flag, along with our other cultural icons, is not merely an historical banner that represents
