COLUMBIA, S.C. - An organizer of the march against the Confederate flag that brought nearly 50,000 people to the Statehouse five years ago regrets her group didn't fight harder to remove the flag completely from the capitol grounds.

Five years ago Friday, two Citadel cadets lowered the Confederate flag from atop the Statehouse dome. At the same time, a similar flag was raised atop a pole by a Confederate monument in front of the Statehouse.

The flag remains there today, and the governor who helped broker the compromise to move the banner said it will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.

"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," said former Gov. Jim Hodges, who personally supported a compromise to put the flag in a less prominent place on Statehouse grounds.

While lawmakers and public officials mostly accepted the compromise, many that fought to get the Confederate flag off the Statehouse dome don't want to see it anywhere on the grounds.

The peak of the fight came in January 2000, when 46,000 people rallied in Columbia, covering the Statehouse lawn on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It was just months after the NAACP announced an economic boycott of South Carolina.

"The march was so incredibly successful. Overnight, the public conversation went from 'Can we bring it down?' to 'Where is it going?' It changed the question," said Julia Sibley Jones with the South Carolina Christian Action Council, a march organizer.

But Jones said those fighting the flag didn't speak with one voice on where it should go.

"The question got reformulated by the Legislature, who, in my opinion, came up with a bad compromise, not a resolution," she said.

The boycott of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will continue until the Confederate flag is completely removed from the Statehouse, said James Gallman the retired president of the state civil rights group.

"I think most people who see where it is located now cannot understand why we would fly on our grounds this symbol," Gallman said.

But the boycott has lost its steam. The political will to remove the flag completely wasn't there in 2000 and still isn't there, legislative leaders say.

Flag supporters are split too.

Ron Wilson, the national vice commander of the pro-flag Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2000, said moving the flag didn't end the NAACP boycott. "From that standpoint, it didn't resolve anything," he said.

Michael Givens, South Carolina commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the compromise satisfied him, but he wished lawmakers 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."