Wherever you grew up in the United States, you’ve probably seen the Confederate flag. Perhaps on a bumper sticker or license plate, or hanging outside a home or government building. You may have seen it at school, like 15-year-old Aleah Crawford, when in 2019, she led a protest to ban the emblem as part of the dress code. Or you may have seen it on the news, when watching coverage of events around the country — such as the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Many of us have seen it, but here’s what you need to know about where it came from and how it became one of the most divisive symbols in U.S. history.

When did it first appear?

During the Civil War, the Confederacy had three official iterations of its flag — none of which resembled the flag we now think of as the Confederate flag. The flag — a red background with a blue St. Andrew's Cross and 13 white stars that represent the states of the Confederacy — was the battle flag flown by several Confederate armies. One of those armies was led by General Robert E. Lee — an often romanticized figure in U.S. history, who led an army whose soldiers kidnapped free Black farmers and sold them into slavery, encouraged the beating of slaves who tried to escape, and fought to protect the institution of slavery. With his surrender at Appomattox Court House, the Civil War came to an end. Though Lee later distanced himself from the flag — requesting that it not be displayed at his funeral during a time in which the flag was used to commemorate Confederate soldiers — after his death, the flag became widely used by various groups and organizations that opposed civil rights.

How was it used post-Civil War?

The Dixiecrat political party, founded in 1948 and composed of white Southern Democrats who advocated for racial segregation, used the flag as their symbol to represent resistance to the federal government — meaning resistance to civil rights being granted to Black people. It has also been used throughout the decades by white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

In 1956, two years after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had declared school segregation to be illegal, the state of Georgia incorporated the battle flag into its official state flag as a symbol of resistance to integration. In 1960, when six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black child to attend an all-white school in the South, she was met by crowds of white people who threw stones at her, called her the N-word, and waved the Confederate flag.

“White Southerners did not so much reinterpret the meaning of the flag as much as they rediscovered a meaning that had always been present going back to the war itself,” wrote Civil War historian Kevin Levin in a 2016 article about the flag for The Daily Beast.

How is it used today?

In June 2015, when 21-year-old Dylann Roof shot and killed nine Black people in a Charleston church after joining them for prayer, the Confederate flag was flying outside the South Carolina statehouse, where it was installed in 2000. In a manifesto Roof published online, he’d expressed wanting to start a “race war” and was photographed stomping and burning the American flag and waving the Confederate flag. Roof’s brutal act renewed debate about the flag’s meaning and use in public spaces. Activist Bree Newsome ripped down the flag at South Carolina’s statehouse before it was permanently taken down weeks after the shootings.