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 From Alabama to Mississippi, Louisiana to Tennessee and beyond,
politicians distanced themselves from flags and statues
memorializing southern heroes of the 1861-65 Civil War.
Alabama's governor ordered the Confederate flag and three other
flags of the Confederacy removed from the grounds of the state's
Capitol in Montgomery, a historically significant city in America's
civil rights movement where Martin Luther King Jr. led protests in
the 1950s.
"This is the right thing to do," said Alabama Governor Robert
Bentley, a Republican.
Among those applauding was Jerri Haslem, 51, who grew up in
Birmingham, Alabama, and remembers as a child being called a racial
slur by a boy wearing a Confederate T-shirt.
"That symbol, the flag, is hurtful for so many people of color. If
you're not a person of color, you might not understand that," she
said. "Now, let us have a conversion with whites and others so we
can heal."
In Mississippi, Republican Senator Roger Wicker said his state's
flag, which features a Confederate battle emblem in its upper left
corner, should be replaced with one that is more unifying.
Republican Governor Phil Bryant, however, said he does not favor
changing the flag, noting voters approved keeping it in a 2001
referendum by a 2-1 margin.
 Weighing in on a debate that has swept the American South since the
massacre of nine blacks in a South Carolina church last week by a
suspected white gunman, Wicker said Mississippi's flag should be put
in a museum and replaced.
Suspected gunman Dylann Roof posed for numerous photos with the
Confederate flag and sitting on the hood of a car with a Confederate
flag on its license plates. He also derided blacks in a manifesto
attributed to him. The shooting at the historically black Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church has been followed quickly by a
nationwide movement to eradicate symbols of the Confederacy from
public spaces, license plates, retail stores and Internet sites.
“There is a new national consensus that is building with great
speed,” said Donald Jones, a University of Miami constitutional law
professor who specializes in civil rights. “It’s like the ice
breaking. What we are witnessing is a melt.”
The debate underlines continuing divisions over a flag seen in the
South as a source of pride and as a remembrance of its soldiers
killed in the Civil War. Others see it as a symbol of oppression and
of a dark chapter in American history that saw 11 rebelling
Confederate states fight to keep blacks enslaved.
It comes a day after South Carolina's legislature voted to debate
removing the Confederate flag from its State House grounds and after
leaders in Tennessee said a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a
Confederate general and the Ku Klux Klan's first grand wizard,
should be removed from the State House.
"IT IS DIVISIVE"
In New Orleans, pressure is growing to remove a monument of
Jefferson Davis, a slave owner who led the Confederate States of
America during the Civil War.
"It is divisive and you can't ignore monuments. You can't be
indifferent to them," said Shawn Anglim, pastor for First Grace
United Methodist Church. "I believe we are in a moment and that many
people are feeling it."
Also in New Orleans, Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the
removal of a 60-foot (18-meter) statue of Robert E. Lee, commander
of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The statue towers
above a major traffic circle.
School districts from California to Texas with buildings or mascots
related to Confederate leaders wrestled with the issue.
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Vocativ, a site that uses its technology to mine Internet data, said
at least 188 public and charter schools across the country have
names linked to prominent Confederates.
California state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat, urged
the San Diego Unified School District to rename an elementary
schools named after Lee. Anyone associated with the Confederate
army, she said, is linked to intolerance and racism.
The Pentagon resisted pressure to change the names of military
installations associated with Confederate generals, saying they
represent "individuals not causes or ideologies."
In Kentucky, calls were also growing to remove a Davis statue. "The
Jefferson Davis statue belongs in a museum, where history is taught,
rather than in the State Capitol, where laws are made,” said
Kentucky state Attorney General Jack Conway.
There were also signs of pushback against moving too fast to remove
the red flag that is crisscrossed by a blue "X" studded with 13
small stars, along with other Confederate symbols.
In southern Washington state, a private group flew a Confederate
flag in a park devoted to honoring Davis, veterans and the
Confederacy heritage in defiance of calls by a local black leader to
take down a symbol of “divisiveness and hatred.”
"We are strictly a veteran heritage organization, whose mission is
to honor and defend the Confederate soldiers good name, defend our
heritage and present the true history of the South to future
generations,” Erik Ernst of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Pacific
Northwest Division wrote on Facebook.
And in Florida, one of the biggest Confederate symbols flies over a
Tampa highway, described by its backers as "the world's largest
Confederate battle flag". It ripples from a 139-foot (42-meter) poll
in a "Confederate Memorial Park" run by the Sons of Confederate
Veterans.
Tampa's Democratic mayor, Bob Buckhorn, has called for it to come
down. But the Sons of Confederate Veterans says it should remain as
a reminder of those killed in the Civil War.
“There were people that disliked the Confederate battle flag before
and it appears they were just looking for some opportunity to create
some kind of vigilante lynch mob calling for attacks on the
Confederate battle flag wherever it be located, wherever it be
displayed,” said David McCallister, a Tampa-area attorney who is
also commander of the local camp of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans.
On the large flag flying in Tampa, he added, “It’s not coming down.”
(Writing by Jason Szep; Additional reporting by Alex Wilts in
Washington, Kathy Finn in New Orleans, Eric Johnson in Seattle,
David Adams in Charleston, Steve Bittenbender in Louisville and Mary
Wisniewski in Chicago; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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