COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – The Confederate battle flag no longer flies at South Carolina’s Statehouse, now relegated to a room filled with other relics of the state’s secession. Other vestiges of the Civil War-era South are unlikely to vanish so soon.
Several states have taken or are considering action to remove the flag and other Confederate symbols and monuments since the massacre of nine people at a Bible study inside a black church; police have charged a man shown in pictures with the flag who they say was motivated by hate. It has been banished from Alabama’s Capitol and federal cemeteries, and Memphis officials are working to move the remains and a statue of slave trader and Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest out of a prominent park.
Still, the region is full of monuments to key players in the Confederacy and even the Ku Klux Klan. Confederate flags remain a common sight on license plates in the South, and the flag is a part of Mississippi’s own state flag. Georgia’s state flag is based on the national flag of the Confederacy known as the stars and bars.
The response in South Carolina and other states is encouraging after 15 years of no activity but was prompted only by a “massacre,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“We need a kind of mental cleansing down here,” Potok said. “It’s 150 years overdue.”