Fifteen years ago, the Confederate flag was removed from the top of the state house building in Columbia, South Carolina. It was moved all of 200 feet, to be planted next to a Confederate memorial inside capitol grounds. Now there is a call for the flag to be moved again – to somewhere no one can see it.

A day after nine African-American men and women were gunned down inside a historic black church in Charleston, allegedly by a white gunman with racist views, mourners and protesters renewed a call that never quite seems to go away in South Carolina: why is the people’s house draped with a symbol of racial division – or regional heritage, as its proponents hold?



Some in South Carolina contacted for this story said the blood of the victims is too fresh to resurrect the flag debate. Or that people rush to fight about the flag because they want to change the subject, to turn away from the latest proof that an old hatred is alive and well.

“We have been able to change a lot of racism,” state senator John W Matthews, 75, a Democrat who has served two decades in the legislature, told the Guardian. “What I call it, racism that you can see. We’ve changed public accommodation, open houses, access to restaurants. And so those things that are visible, we have changed substantially. But racism of the heart is the most difficult to change. And that has not changed fully.”

Before the killings on Wednesday night, the debate over the Confederate flag in South Carolina had not been as vital as it once was. Fifteen years ago, the flag was the subject of a gritty partisan struggle in the state house and an economic boycott by the NAACP. The fight even broke into the 2000 presidential campaign, with Republican candidate John McCain defending the flag’s placement, only to admit, after he had lost, that he had only taken his stance to win the state’s primary.

The real friction was inside the South Carolina legislature, however, where a core group of Republican senators squared off to oppose African-American leaders such as state senators Kay Patterson and Matthews, who wanted the flag taken down. Flag opponents saw a special opportunity in support from of the freshly installed Democratic governor, Jim Hodges.

The two sides eventually cut a deal to move the flag to the Confederate monument. Hodges signed the law to move the flag in May 2000 – the same month that he signed a law making South Carolina the last state to recognise Martin Luther King Jr day as a paid holiday. A rectangular version of the flag that had flown atop the capitol was replaced with a more historically accurate, square-shaped flag with a border.

Matthews said the goal in 1999 was to remove not only the Confederate flag on top of the capitol building, but also the multiple flags inside it. “The removal of the flags, you’ve got to understand, the time in which the debate was taking place, we were still talking about the values of the old South and not necessarily the new South,” Matthews said in an phone interview from his home in Columbia. “And those values of the old South, the Caucasian community – not necessarily to all but to a lot of them – they thought [the flag] was important. But to African-Americans, we saw it as suppression.

“There were flags in the chambers, and each one was hanging in the state house over the desks. And when you said the pledge of allegiance in the morning, you had to look at those flags. There were flags in the rotunda. There was a flag on top of the state house, which implies sovereignty.”

The removal of the flag to the Confederate monument was the last of multiple compromises the two sides had considered, Matthews said. “There were several proposals on the table. It finally wound up, the compromise was, to put it out there by the Confederate monument. Everybody didn’t quite agree to that. That was the compromise. That took out about five flags. One atop the statehouse, and about three or four out of the statehouse. First we had a compromise to put it in the museum, which is where we thought it should be. That was a very close vote.”

Matthews recalled serving in the legislature with Clementa Pinckney, the reverend who was among those shot dead inside Emanuel AME church Wednesday. Pinckney had been a state senator since 2001. “His passion was to serve people and to change this state,” Matthews said. “Senator Pinckney being elected to the senate will tell you how far we’ve come. How he died will tell you how far we have to go.”