The confederate flag flies on the grounds of the South Carolina State House in Columbia, South CarolinaJim Watson/AFP / Getty Images
Today, in the state where the first shots of civil war were fired some 154 years ago, the losing side's battle flag finally came down.
In the aftermath of a massacre that left nine black churchgoers dead, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley signed a bill that removed the Confederate Battle flag from its pole outside the state's seat of government on Friday morning. The lowering of the flag once raised by proponents of slavery marks both an end and a beginning – an end to South Carolina's official glorification of the emblem, and the beginning of a nationwide reckoning on the proper place of an icon inseparable from America's oldest offence.
Read the latest: Confederate flag removed from South Carolina Statehouse grounds
It took an act of racial terror to force South Carolina's legislative ranks to act. On June 17, a man named Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. He stands accused of killing nine people. Mr. Roof's extensive background as a white supremacist leaves little doubt as to why he chose a historic black church.
In the days following the shooting many were quick to point out that, even as other official flags were lowered in mourning of the victims, the Confederate battle flag outside the statehouse flew high.
In fact, it was impossible to lower the flag in any traditional sense – it has been, for years, locked in place. It exists, in many ways, outside the rules of traditional nationhood, representing a country that no longer exists and a history from which the most egregious sins are often under-emphasized by those who claim the flag represents "heritage, not hate."
But the heritage of the Confederate battle flag, like the Confederacy itself, cannot be severed from the thing it fundamentally represents – a southern state whose use of enslaved black bodies built and sustained a cotton industry that became one of the most profitable commercial enterprises in human history.
Supporters of the flag argue that the majority of Confederate soldiers were not slave-owners, and were in fact fighting for their homeland. But opponents counter that whether each individual Confederate soldier believed in the cause of slavery matters little – the flag they carried into battle was of a place where black human beings were not human beings at all, but fuel.
In South Carolina, that flag now becomes the stuff of history. It will be moved to a state museum – the so-called "relic room."
But elsewhere, it still flies high. All over the U.S., debate rages over the battle flag's presence in cemeteries, on license plates and on all manner of private property. The Confederate battle emblem still lives inside the flag of the state of Mississippi. A statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis still stands in the U.S. Capitol. Like almost all polarizing issues in American life, the debate over the Confederate flag will be settled slowly and state by state.
There's an argument to be made that, unaccompanied by an honest and open accounting of slavery's continued impact on modern-day America, the removal of the Confederate battle flag is simply symbolism.
But symbols matter. Not only was the flag one of the banners of the pro-slavery states during the civil war, it re-emerged a century later an unsubtle rejection of the civil rights movement. Indeed, it was in that latter context, 50 years ago, that the Confederate battle flag found new life aside the South Carolina statehouse.
In the end, the final vote among the state's lawmakers to remove the Confederate battle flag was 94 in favour, 20 opposed. Perhaps more important than the final numbers, or even the decision itself, was the emotional debate that preceded the vote – one that allowed for a frank discussion of slavery's centuries-long repercussions.
"My heritage is based on a group of people who were brought here in chains: who were denigrated, demagogued, lynched and killed, denied a right to vote, denied the right to even have a family," said South Carolina Representative Joseph H. Neal, a black Democrat, in a speech in the statehouse.
"The whole world is asking if South Carolina is really going to change, or will it hold to an ugly tradition of prejudice and discrimination and hide behind 'heritage' as an excuse for it."