Debate begins over flag’s removal

Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C.

South Carolina lawmakers on Monday began debating whether to bring the Confederate flag down outside the Capitol, starting with a pair of senators – one white, one black – whose families arrived in the state before the Civil War.

The white senator, who for decades fought off attempts to remove the flag from Statehouse grounds, has come to the same conclusion that his black colleague arrived at long ago – that the rebel flag no longer represents the valor of Southern soldiers but the racism that led them to separate from the United States more than 150 years ago.

The Confederate flag “has more to do with what was going on in the 1960s as opposed to the 1860s,” said Republican Sen. Larry Martin, who is white and whose family came to South Carolina’s northern backcountry in the early 1800s.

Martin said he changed his mind after nine people were shot to death during Bible study at a historic African-American church in Charleston by a man police say was motivated by racial hatred.

Then there was Sen. Darrell Jackson, a black Democrat who helped write the compromise that took the Confederate flag off the Statehouse dome in 2000 and put it in its current location on a pole on the capitol’s front lawn. His family was also in South Carolina during the Civil War. His great-grandfather’s brother left a plantation and joined the Union army when Gen. William Sherman came storming through Columbia.

Jackson said he regretted not going further to get rid of the flag completely 15 years ago. But he welcomed the chance now to honor his great-grandfather, freed slave Ishmael Jackson.