Flag Supporters React With a Mix of Compromise, Caution and Outright Defiance
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSONJUNE 23, 2015

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It has been quite a few years since the lost cause has appeared quite as lost as it did Tuesday. As the afternoon drew on and their retreat turned into a rout, the lingering upholders of the Confederacy watched as license plates, statues and prominently placed Confederate battle flags slipped from their reach.

“This is the beginning of communism,” said Robert Lampley, who was standing in the blazing sun in front of the South Carolina State House shortly after the legislature voted overwhelmingly to debate the current placement of the Confederate battle flag. “The South is the last bastion of liberty and independence. I know we’re going to lose eventually.”

“Our people are dying off,” he went on, before encouraging a white reporter to “keep reproducing.”

Confederate sympathizers across the country have insisted over the last few days that the racism-fueled massacre of nine black people in a Charleston church had nothing to do with their symbols, even though Dylann Roof, charged in the killings, embraced those symbols in photos and in his speech. But such arguments have had limited effect, as politicians all over the South have reacted to the shooting by welcoming the elimination of such symbols, or at least some high-profile ones, from state property.

Calls to Cut Ties to Symbols of the South
Resistance to this push has varied, with some hard-core Confederate sympathizers who swore defiance to politicians explaining that they simply thought things were moving too quickly. Lawmakers in South Carolina who voted against opening the placement of the flag to debate said they were concerned that the flag’s rushed removal would lead to the renaming of countless streets and the destruction of Confederate monuments that are strewn across the state.

“We want to proceed and make sure that we’re doing it properly and we don’t have unintended consequences,” said State Representative Craig Gagnon, who is originally from Lowell, Mass. — with forebears who fought for the Union — but represents a conservative district. “We don’t want to just trash everything and take everything away.”

He thought a good compromise would be to replace the battle flag at the State House with another flag from the Confederacy, one that had not become so associated with contemporary racist movements. Others were not inclined to talk compromise at all.

“You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters,” said Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the executive director of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis.

Mr. Stewart was livid at the “reckless and unnecessary” statement by Philip Gunn, the Republican speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, that the Confederate battle saltire needed to be removed from the Mississippi state flag. Mr. Stewart pointed out that the state had voted by huge margins to keep the flag as it was in 2001, and that should have been that.

Here in South Carolina, members of the state division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans were not as fervent in opposition to their political representatives, but they did maintain that now was not the time to discuss moving the flag. While he insisted that hatred and racism had no place in the organization, Kenneth Thrasher, the lieutenant commander for the division, said in an interview that he could understand taking down the flag while the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a state senator and one of the nine killed in Charleston, was lying in state.

“But to permanently decide today is a little too fast,” he said. “The flag didn’t kill anybody. It was a deranged young man who did.” Mr. Thrasher said he could be agreeable to a compromise, like allowing the flag to fly in front of the state museum.

Divisive Symbolism of a Southern Flag
This sentiment was not universally well received among the membership.

“He should be knocking heads together instead of just laying down and rolling over,” said Harris Dail, a member who lives in Topeka, Kan., and who accused Mr. Thrasher of having “caved in with the rest of these brainwashed people” in a comment on the division’s website.

Those who sold Confederate goods said efforts to remove the flag from stores were based on a misunderstanding of its current meaning to many Southerners. Freddie Rich, the owner of RebelStore.com from Kings Mountain, N.C., which sells Confederate flags and bumper stickers (including one that reads, “I Believe the South Was Right, and I Don’t Believe in Slavery — Then or Now”) said his customers bought Confederacy-themed merchandise as an expression of regional pride and admiration for Civil War veterans.

“There’s nothing racial about it,” he said of the flag. “This is history to us.”

Still, it was a mixed day. With Walmart and Sears ceasing to sell Confederate merchandise, Mr. Rich said his store had around a 2,000 percent increase in sales in the last 24 hours. Told that eBay had also announced a ban, he let out a whoop.

Finally, there were some who were resigned to surrender.

In Austin, Tex., a tall bearded man went into the tattoo parlor where Kelly Barr works with a request: the removal a 10-year-old tattoo of the Confederate flag.

He told Mr. Barr that he had decided to get the flag removed when he saw the pained look on a middle-age black woman at his gym on Monday.

“ ‘If South Carolina can take theirs down,’ ” Mr. Barr recalled him saying, “ ‘I can take mine down.’ ” I told him, ‘Right on.’ ”

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