Mason Adams writes from southwest Virginia. He's on Twitter at @MasonAtoms.

One year ago, a white supremacist obsessed with the Civil War fatally shot nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Afterward, when photos of alleged shooter Dylann Roof posing with a rebel flag appeared, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley called for the flag to come down from in front of the state Capitol. Donald Trump, then only days into his 2016 campaign, said he agreed with her decision. “I would take it down, yes,” he said. “I think they should put it in a museum and respect whatever it is you have to respect.”

A year later, the backlash against the Confederate flag has spurred a counter-backlash, one that is playing out in countless skirmishes in courtrooms, township council rooms, bedrooms and Facebook posts, especially in the South. In the six months after the Charleston shooting, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 364 Confederate flag rallies around the South. That doesn’t include a spurt of growth in the number of flags on private lawns and on bumper stickers.


“It’s like they say: Take one flag down and 1,000 go up,” says Tim Boone, who as founder of Rebel-lution, one of the many pro-flag activist groups that formed last summer and handed out “No votes for turncoats” stickers targeting the newly unpopular Haley and anyone else who might vote to take down a flag.

The backlash has extended to the national scene as well. Haley, once floated as a veep choice, is no longer mentioned in elite GOP circles. She’s expressed a desire to see the Citadel remove the rebel flag from its chapel, but her hands are tied by the state Legislature. Haley has linked the tone of Trump's rhetoric to the kind of violence seen last year in Charleston, but she’s still indicated she’ll support him as the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

Trump, meanwhile, has utterly dismissed the South Carolina governor, and he’s drawing support from many Confederate flag supporters who condemned Haley for her actions last year. And in contrast to his remarks about the flag a year ago, Trump has shifted rightward; many of those in the bizarre coalition of racists, anti-government radicals and states’ rights activists who’ve led the battle charge for restoration of the rebel flag believe the GOP presumptive nominee is dog-whistling encouragement to them.

Trump’s face appears on the cover of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual report on domestic extremism, which found that from 2014 to 2015, right-wing hate groups grew 14 percent to almost 900. The Ku Klux Klan grew from 72 chapters to 190, although some of that growth came from the two largest groups splintering into smaller cells. Anti-government patriot/liberty groups, which have flourished over Obama’s two terms, grew to nearly 1,000.

Despite his 2015 flag statement, his “New York values” and his status as a genuine Yankee, those groups, along with the rest of the disparate coalition that has vocally supported the Confederate flag over the past year, have aligned behind Trump.

“I’m voting for him despite that [his statement about the flag],” says Boone. “The reason I’ll vote for Trump is probably the reason I feel most of the country is going to vote for him: They’re sick of the political correctness. We’re so worried about the minority getting their feelings hurt, with the flag, with transgender bathrooms and all that. Sometimes, the minority has to understand that their feelings get hurt too, and majority rules most of the time.”

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It’s not that nothing at all has changed a year since the Charleston shooting. At the University of Mississippi, the newly reconstituted student NAACP chapter began pressing administrators to remove the state flag, which also incorporates Confederate iconography. When they organized a protest in front of the administration building, the Ku Klux Klan showed up.

“We wanted to draw a relationship between that flag and white supremacy, to demonstrate that you’re either on the side of white supremacy or on the side of justice,” says James Thomas, assistant professor of sociology and the chapter’s faculty adviser. “So when the KKK showed up, it was perfect. When they were yelling at our students ‘black lives don’t matter,’ and ‘Go back to Africa,’ it made it very easy for us to draw the lines and make that contrast.”

Within two weeks, the student Senate, faculty Senate, staff council, graduate school council and law school all called for removal of the state flag on campus. Administrators gave in and took down state flags in late October.

Other flags have come down too, by order of a judge or a vote of an elected body. Governing bodies began fierce debates over removing Confederate flags from public property. The Memphis City Council pushed to remove a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who helped found the Ku Klux Klan after the war. The New Orleans City Council took down three Confederate statues and another commemorating an 1874 rebellion against the city’s Reconstruction government. In Patrick County, Virginia, Judge Martin Clark ordered a portrait of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart taken down in the courthouse.

But Potok says the chance for more change has passed. “Initially, it looked, right after the massacre, like symbols of the Confederacy were about to be stripped from the South,” he says. “That did happen in some places, but it almost immediately engendered a real backlash, with the flag being embraced by all kinds of sectors of the radical right. I think what has happened is that for groups on the radical right, the Confederate battle flag has become a symbol of resistance to the federal government, which is their key issue. If you think about the Civil War, it makes sense; it was a battle fought by the South against the federal government.”

A new flourishing of Confederate flags is certainly evident in Floyd County, Virginia, where both Boone and I live. I travel regularly to Blacksburg by two different routes, and now I see at least half a dozen rebel flags on either route, in addition to an occasional American flag turned upside-down—a military signifier of distress, and—in this context—a statement of loving the country while opposing the federal government. The Confederate battle has also drawn support from anti-federal government patriot/liberty groups of the kind that support Trump. Boone, for example, is not just a flag activist, but a member of the anti-federal government 3 Percenters, a Constitutionalist militia group founded in Alabama about the time Barack Obama was elected as president.

Meanwhile the debate over the meaning of the flag persists, and Trump supporters in the South appear to be encouraged by his candidacy—and the way in which his rhetoric has helped to legitimize their own campaign. Flag rallies are no longer the domain of grizzled enactors dedicated to remembering the Civil War, but have been transformed by this new coalition.

In December, the Roanoke Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter arrived at the city’s annual Christmas Parade with fewer than 20 people, says Mark Craig, the group’s commander, but just before the parade started, a new group arrived, some of whom grabbed the SCV’s flags and began waving them. As the parade progressed, more joined from the sidewalks, including some conspicuously wearing firearms as a display of Second Amendment rights. Craig says he has no idea how many were marching by the end, but estimates between 75 and 100.

“People who had flags that were in the crowd, they started jumping out and getting in the parade,” Craig says. “I have no idea how many got in, but they were not our people.”

Craig notes that battle flags were used during the Civil War to keep regiments together on battlefields obscured by black powder smoke. A similar fog of war pervades the political battlefield today, and the battle flag’s mutable meaning only adds confusion. It’s the same question faced by non-whites after the Civil War and still today: How can one discern the intentions of the person waving the flag?

In Charleston, South Carolina, not far from where Emanuel AME lost its pastor and eight others, Michael Allen works as a National Park Service historian at historic Civil War and Reconstruction sites, including some that Roof visited in the days leading up to the shooting.

Allen, a black man who has taken Roof’s effrontery as a challenge to better tell the region’s history, says it’s important to consider the flag’s many historical meanings. The flag stands for ancestral heritage, yes, but it’s also stood for anti-federal sentiment, racism, violence, terror and the denial of human rights based on skin color.

“When you have an affair with multiple groups and entities marching, you may not always be on the same page and may even be opposed to each other,” Allen says. “But if you didn’t challenge them, that makes you complicit.”

That fog of meaning that inherently comes with the Confederate battle flag now is extending to Trump’s presidential campaign. For every white supremacist he retweets, every mumble-mouthed disclaimer of racists, the murk around him grows thicker.

In that respect, the debate over the Confederate flag echoes in many ways the larger debate over Trump’s candidacy. When he criticizes the judge in the Trump University case, Gonzalo Curiel, for for his “Mexican” heritage, is Trump practicing “textbook racism,” the phrase used by his fellow Republican, House Speaker Paul Ryan? Many Americans would probably say so. And yet to Trump’s supporters, he’s getting an unfair rap for simply defying what they see as a PC culture that has unfairly demonized a part of their history.

“He gets called a racist, but I don’t think he’s a racist. He’s just speaking what’s on his mind and heart, and I honestly wish the rest of the country would do that,” says Boone, the Rebel-lution founder. “It doesn’t matter to me. It’s kind of secondary. Basically, it boils down to people like myself who are so sick of this weak-kneed, politically correct outlook on life that we’ve got to sidestep everyone who gets their feelings hurt.”

As the summer heats up, and ceremonies commemorate the first anniversary of last year’s tragic shootings at Emanuel AME, the fight over the Confederate battle flag’s proper place in the 21st century will likely rekindle—this time against the backdrop of what’s looks to be the nastiest general election fight in modern history.

That juxtaposition may well lend a partisan edge to the flag debate, where unrelated issues get wrapped in an argument over culture and symbolism, but it also could inject a dose of historic bitterness into the fight for the White House. Add in the feedback cycle of tailored social media and news sources, and the United States could see a polarized populace still fighting over a cultural and political divide with roots dating more than 150 years, when the Confederate battle flag was first raised in rebellion.