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17 The Confederate Battle Flag The year was 1962. I was teaching eighth grade youngsters at Simonton School in Charleston. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the fact that up in Columbia, the all-white General Assembly was hoisting a Confederate flag atop the State House to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the state’s participation in the Civil War. Our classroom discussions were directed elsewhere in those days. I was trying to energize those young minds about the world around them. I was more interested in preparing those students to look forward and anticipate what the next one hundred years might bring to our planet. Although I have not found anything in writing, Governor West told me that it was understood that the resolution authorizing the flying of the flag was to be for that legislative session; but, somehow at the end of that two-year period, the flag was not brought down. No one bothered to raise the question, and year after year, the flag fluttered there beneath the American and state flags. Over time I guess people came to accept it as one of those things “that’s always been there” and didn’t question the political propriety of it or the message that it sent. Tourists noticed it and took pictures. Postcards on sale at the Capitol Newsstand, a half block away from the State House, displayed it as an identifiable part of the state’s culture of resistance. A lot of people, I think, believed that the flag had been there since the days of the Confederacy and therefore represented some kind of historical linkage to the state’s past. Even when it became known that it was a fairly recent addition to the flagpole, there was relative indifference toward it. It was a hundred feet in the air, and people had to crane their necks to see it. What’s the harm? Civil rights leaders were busy with other important issues at the time, flexing their political muscles over things such as desegregation of public schools and the right for black South Carolinians to cast ballots in local, state, and federal elections. The presence of “that” flag atop the State House seemed almost incidental by comparison . Once, during his second term in office during the late 1960s, Governor Robert E. McNair decided to see what kind of reaction he would get if the Confederate flag was not raised one day. By midday the furor was so great that he quickly put it back in place, telling callers that it had been “sent out to be cleaned.” 148 A Racial Arbiter It was about then that people began to realize that the flag’s presence atop the State House dome was not so casual or incidental to a lot of people. And it was about then that many black South Carolinians began to wonder why a flag they felt symbolized slavery and oppression was flying atop their State House. A Lonely Vigil That flag did not enter my consciousness until a few days after I became a member of Governor John West’s staff in January 1971. I was sitting in my makeshift office just off the lobby of the governor’s office when a reporter walked in and asked how it felt to be sitting under a dome that was prominently flying the Confederate battle flag. I had never given it a thought and was at a loss as to how to answer the reporter’s question . I don’t remember exactly how I did. In 1977 my good friend and neighbor Kay Patterson, who was serving in the S.C. House of Representatives, decided it was time to address the flag issue head-on and at full speed—which, by the way, was the only way Kay Patterson ever did anything . But while he was one of twelve black legislators serving in the House at the time, the issue didn’t generate much political “traction.” People had other things on their minds, and Kay’s vigorous calls to action seemed like a voice in the wilderness. Well the flag didn’t come down; the issue didn’t go away; and Kay Patterson didn’t back off. Year after year he renewed his protests, gaining a little support as he went along. I agreed with Kay and had my own strong feelings that the flag should come down. But I was also a state agency head who had to navigate...

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