The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley faced a storm of criticism on Friday after she said the Confederate battle flag represented “service and sacrifice and heritage” before it was “hijacked” by Dylann Roof, the gunman who killed nine African American people in a Bible study class in Charleston in June 2015.

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“Nonsense,” the civil war historian Kevin M Levin wrote on Twitter. “Tell that to the white men who in 1920 forced a young African American man to kiss a Confederate flag before they lynched him.”

The Confederate soldiers who fought under the flag during the civil war of 1861-65 fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union over the issue, in December 1860, and the first shots of the war were fired in the state in April the following year.

“Roof’s actions,” said the Atlantic writer Adam Serwer, “were completely consistent with the cause of that flag and all the ‘service, sacrifice and heritage’ associated with it. The Confederate flag represents treason in defence of human bondage and white supremacy, it always has, and always will.”

Roof’s manifesto and pictures of him posing with the flag were revealed on a website after the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston on 17 June 2015.

As the Guardian reported at the time: “Under a section entitled ‘An Explanation’, the website appears to allude to the forthcoming massacre.

“‘I have no choice,’ it states. ‘I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is [the] most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country.’”

The website also contained “what appears to be a manifesto filled with racist diatribe about blacks, Jews and Hispanics”.

Haley, a Republican and Donald Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, was speaking to Glenn Beck, host of the rightwing website and podcast The Blaze.

Haley has released a book, With All Due Respect, and has been widely touted as either a replacement for the Vice-President Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket or a Republican presidential candidate herself. Her conversation with Beck was due to be broadcast in full on Saturday.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Ku Klux Klan member shouts racial slurs at a Klan demonstration at the state house building on 18 July 2015 in Columbia, South Carolina. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

“South Carolina fell to our knees when this happened,” Haley told Beck. “This is one of the oldest African American churches. These … people were amazing people, they loved their church, they loved their family, they loved their community.

“And here is this guy that comes out with this manifesto, holding the Confederate flag, and had just hijacked everything that people thought of.

“We don’t have hateful people in South Carolina,” Haley claimed. “There’s always the small minority that’s always gonna be there but people saw [the flag] as service and sacrifice and heritage, but once he did that there was no way to overcome it.”

At the time of the Charleston shooting, Beck himself said flying “the Confederate flag makes no sense whatsoever” and there were “no ifs, and, or buts” that slavery was the central issue of the civil war.

Haley was defended by Bakari Sellers, an African American Democratic politician from South Carolina, who wrote that though “Twitter will hate me for this. I know Nikki Haley and believe she misspoke. She knows the pain associated with the flag.”

But Haley makes similar claims in her book, saying Roof “robbed the good-intentioned South Carolinians who supported the flag of this symbol of heritage and service” and saying she “worried that allowing the killer to define what the flag represented for everyone was a surrender”.

Haley eventually presided over the removal of the flag from the South Carolina capitol, after protests and attempts to tear it down.

On Friday, Levin said she should not “push this painful history under the rug for political purposes. In the end, you did the right thing by calling for the removal of the flag in 2015, but this dishonours the memory of the Charleston Nine.”

Haley also told Beck she resisted the politicisation of the shooting.

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“The national media came in droves,” she said. “They wanted to define what happened, they wanted to make this about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make it about [the] death penalty.

“And I really pushed off the national media and said: ‘There will be a time and place where we talk about this but it is not now, we’re gonna get through the funerals, we’re gonna respect them and then we will have that conversation.’

“And we had a really tough few weeks of debate but we didn’t have riots, we had vigils. We didn’t have protests, we had hugs. And the people of South Carolina stepped up and showed the world what it is to have grace and strength in the eyes of tragedy.”

In a tweet on Friday, Haley linked to a transcript of her remarks on the flag in 2015 and said it “was a painful time for our state. The pain was and is still real. Below was my call for the removal of the Confederate flag & I stand by it. I continue to be proud of the people of SC and how we turned the hate of a killer into the love for each other.”

She also retweeted defences of her remarks to Beck.

Roof remains in prison, having been sentenced to death.

