The South Carolina Secessionist Party, a group responsible for at least two Confederate flag displays in Clemson since September, is dissolving, party chairman James Bessenger said.

Bessenger said the organization is "shutting up shop" and "on its way out."

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This month, the Confederate flag that once flew above the South Carolina State House was moved to the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. In September, Bessenger said his organization would continue to display the flag in Clemson until the one removed from the State House was moved to the museum.

But Bessenger said the organization fractured prior to the move of the flag and has been having issues since last year. He said he has shut down the organization's website and Facebook page.

Despite removing the main Facebook page, other Facebook groups using the Secessionist Party name remain active. A group specific to Anderson County has over 600 members while a group for the Upstate had over 2,200 members.

Bessenger said he did not know whether former members of his group would engage in future flag displays in Clemson, but that if they did, they were not coming from his organization.

"The organization was taking a turn I didn't want it to take," Bessenger, who is gay, told the Anderson Independent Mail.

Bessenger said he got involved in the organization in 2015 for the "history perspective."

"The people genuinely interested in the history are less in number than people who are blatant and racist homophobes," Bessenger said. "I don't want to be associated with an organization or movement riddled with those types of people."

Bessenger said he does not regret his actions as part of the group, but said if he had let the organization continue, "I might have regretted it in the future."

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Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, said the South Carolina Secessionist Party was relatively minor in the larger Confederate movement.

Hankes said the group was mostly involved in flagging events like those in Clemson and promoted the revisionist "lost cause mythology" of the Civil War.

"Them disbanding doesn't mean much for the neo-Confederate movement," Hankes said.

Hankes said the biggest thing people should know about groups like the Secessionist Party is that they work by drawing attention to themselves.

"Try not to give them what they want," Hankes said.

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