Flag controversy in background but not resolved

Flag controversy in background but not resolved
A legislative compromise five years ago removed the Confederate flag from atop the State House but not from the Capitol grounds
By AARON GOULD SHEININ
Staff Writer

Five years ago today, two Citadel cadets lowered the Confederate flag from atop the State House dome. Moments later, a similar banner was hoisted atop a pole on the State House grounds.

It was a legislative compromise that satisfied few but relieved many — and continues to do so five years later.

Today, there are few discussions about the flag in official circles. Bills dealing with the issue have disappeared from the legislative agenda.

But, five years ago, the flag tore at the Palmetto State’s soul, causing South Carolinians to look for middle ground.

“There was an opening, ... a chance to reach some resolution,” former Gov. Jim Hodges said last week.

While not the proposal he favored, Hodges says the compromise of 2000 settled the flag issue for the foreseeable future.

When Democrat Hodges was elected in 1998, the flag fight was in a lull. Hodges’ predecessor, Republican David Beasley, had tried and failed to move the flag in 1996. After that, the effort waned.

Hodges said he felt that for much of the state, “the wounds were too fresh” from Beasley’s failed attempt “to try to revisit” the issue. “There was not much interest in the Legislature and elsewhere.”

However, the NAACP brought the issue back to the fore with its 1999 decision to launch an economic boycott of the state.

Once the fight was started, the flag had to come down, said Hodges, governor from 1999 to 2003. “It would have been very damaging to the state if we brought this issue up again and we were unable to reach some sort of resolution.”

With the boycott set to begin Jan. 1, 2000, J.T. McLawhorn Jr. and the Columbia Urban League began to gather support for a Columbia march and rally against the flag Jan. 17, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

“It was a spiritual journey,” McLawhorn, the Urban League’s president and chief executive officer, said Thursday. “The march and rally galvanized support and brought national and international attention.”

With the cries of the rally still ringing in their ears, lawmakers returned to work the next day.

“The march was so incredibly successful,” said Julia Sibley Jones, public policy director of S.C. Christian Action Council, a march organizer. “Overnight, the public conversation went from ‘Can we bring it down?’ to ‘Where is it going?’ It changed the question.”

In hindsight, Sibley Jones said, her side was not as prepared for the new, second question.

“We didn’t have one answer to that second question. We had a lot of answers, but we didn’t speak with one voice,” she said. “The question got reformulated by the Legislature, who, in my opinion, came up with a bad compromise, not a resolution.”

Today, Sibley Jones, the Urban League and the NAACP say they wanted the flag moved from the State House grounds completely, not moved from the dome to the Confederate Soldiers Monument.

“There was no compromise from the NAACP’s side,” said James Gallman, the retired president of the S.C. Conference of the NAACP. “I think most people who see where it is located now cannot understand why we would fly on our grounds this symbol.”

The reason — those involved in the campaign to lower the flag say — is that was the only solution that could win legislative votes.

“Those who wanted it off the dome and off the grounds entirely, they had to see that that was not a solution that was going to happen,” Hodges said.

Hodges, who favored a less visible State House location, at the Wade Hampton monument, said there were nearly a dozen different compromise proposals. But legislative support quickly coalesced around the Soldiers Monument.

State Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, one of the key supporters of the compromise, said moving the flag to the Soldiers Monument at Gervais and Main streets was as good as any deal was going to get.

There was simply not the political will, especially among Republicans, to move the flag completely off the State House grounds, Hodges, Ford and then-Speaker David Wilkins have said.

Today, the financial impact of the NAACP’s boycott is slight. However, it and a similar boycott over the flag by the NCAA — barring major athletic championships from the state — have kept the issue alive for compromise opponents.

“I didn’t like removing the flag from the dome,” said Ron Wilson of Anderson, national vice commander of the pro-flag Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2000. “I didn’t think the NAACP would drop their boycott (if the flag was kept on the grounds). From that standpoint, it didn’t resolve anything.”

Michael Givens, S.C. commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, is satisfied — if not pleased — with the flag’s location.

But he wishes the Legislature had allowed South Carolinians to vote on the issue.

“We lost, OK?” Givens said. “We wanted the flag to stay where it was. We lost. But we never squawked about it.”