Links between the C.C.C. and G.O.P. politicians emerged in 1998, when it was reported that Congressman Robert Barr, of Georgia, had delivered the keynote address at the C.C.C.’s national convention. In South Carolina, members of the group participated in the political campaign to keep the Confederate flag flying from the dome of the State Capitol. Photograph by Kim Truett / AP

If Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and the other serious contenders for the Republican nomination haven’t yet contacted Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, to thank her for what she did on Monday, it’s time for them to get on the horn. In calling for the Confederate flag to be taken down from the state capitol in Columbia, Haley didn’t just do the right thing by the victims of last week’s mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston; she also helped to lance a boil that was threatening to infect her party.

Having been twice voted into office with the support of many people who venerate the Stars and Bars, Haley was careful to balance their interests with her own position. She acknowledged that many South Carolinians view the flag as “a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty” and as a memorial to their ancestors, adding, “that is not hate, nor is it racist.” But to other South Carolinians, Haley went on, “the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past." She concluded, "It is time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds.”

That isn’t the end of this story, however. For one thing, the flag still hasn’t been taken down. On Tuesday, South Carolina lawmakers voted to debate hauling down the flag, and State Senator Paul Thurmond, son of the segregationist Strom Thurmond, indicated he favored such a course. But it wasn't immediately clear when this vote will take place. On Wednesday, when the body of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a widely respected state senator who was also the pastor of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, is brought to the Capitol to lie in state, the flag may well still be flying nearby.

Even if common decency prevails, however, and it is taken down before Pinckney’s coffin arrives, Republicans will still have some explaining to do. The furor over the flag has distracted attention from another disturbing element of the story in Charleston: apparently, Dylann Roof, the accused shooter, picked up some of his racist ideology from a right-wing hate group that has had extensive ties with the Republican Party, and whose leader has donated more than thirteen thousand dollars to four G.O.P. Presidential candidates.

In an online essay, which Mother Jones and other Web sites excerpted or reposted, Roof recalled that he didn’t grow up in a racist home. “Growing up, in school, the White and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but all they were were jokes,” he wrote. In Roof’s telling, it was the Trayvon Martin case that radicalized him, prompting him to type “black on White crime” into Google. Roof went on:

The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

The Council of Conservative Citizens, which is based in Missouri, is not well known nationally, but it is a familiar presence in right-wing circles. Over the weekend, the Guardian’s Jon Swaine reported that its leader, Earl Holt III, has donated more than ten thousand dollars to the Presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum. And in a follow-up story, Swaine revealed that another twenty Republican politicians also received money from Holt. They include Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, one of the front-runners in the 2016 race; U.S. senators Joni Ernst, of Iowa; Thom Tillis, of North Carolina; Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana; and Tom Cotton, of Arkansas; and Congressman Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin. All told, according to Swaine, Holt has in recent years donated seventy-four thousand dollars to G.O.P. candidates.

Founded in 1985, the C.C.C.’s Web site says that it is dedicated to preserving “liberty, justice, and national safety.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing groups, the C.C.C. “has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing the late pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to black people as ‘a retrograde species of humanity.’ ” Holt apparently became the C.C.C.’s president earlier this year, following the death of its longtime leader, Gordon Baum. Less is known about Holt than about Baum, but Holt appears to have posted semi-regular comments on articles published by The Blaze, a conservative news site, including one comment claiming that blacks have “murdered about 200,000 whites in America since the mid-1960s.”

On being contacted by the Guardian about Holt’s donations, the Cruz, Paul, and Santorum campaigns all distanced themselves from him and said that they would return his money or donate it to charity. “Senator Cruz believes that there is no place for racism in society,” a spokesman for Cruz, who has received eighty-five hundred dollars from Holt since 2012, said in a statement. “Upon learning about Mr. Holt’s background and his contributions to the campaign, he immediately instructed that all of those donations be returned.” Subsequently, many of the other Republicans who have received money from Holt also promised to give it back or donate it to charity. “I do not agree with his hateful beliefs and language and believe they are hurtful to our country,” Cotton said in a statement.

That’s all good to know, though a skeptic might wonder if anybody in the Republican Party thought to inquire earlier about the identity of this generous donor and the organization he leads. “Despite the group’s obvious racism, its mainstream political connections run deep,” Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote in a post published Tuesday about the C.C.C. “And they’re not entirely a thing of the past.” Links between the C.C.C. and G.O.P. politicians emerged in 1998, when it was reported that Congressman Robert Barr, of Georgia, had delivered the keynote address at the C.C.C.’s national convention. After that revelation prompted some negative publicity, the then chairman of the Republican National Committee, Jim Nicholson, called on his fellow party members to resign from the C.C.C., saying, ‘‘A member of the party of Lincoln should not belong to such an organization.’’

According to Cohen, the ties persisted. In 2004, his organization revealed that thirty-eight politicians—“the vast majority of them Republicans,” including Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee—had attended C.C.C. events during the previous four years. In South Carolina, members of the C.C.C. participated in the political campaign to keep the Confederate flag flying from the dome of the State Capitol. (In 2000, it was moved to a flagpole nearby.) More recently, in 2013, it emerged that a prominent South Carolina Republican, Roan Garcia-Quintana, was a longtime member of the C.C.C. and a member of its national board. (According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s profile of Garcia-Quintana, he acknowledged his ties to the C.C.C. but said that he had never read the organization’s statement of principles.)