Washington D.C. residents reacted Wednesday to the revamped controversy surrounding the Confederate flag flying over South Carolina’s state capitol, which has fueled debate over institutional racism in America a week after a gunman allegedly killed nine parishioners at a historically black church in the state.
The Confederate flag jumped into the media spotlight June 20 when photos surfaced of Dylan Roof, the alleged 21-year-old white shooter, holding a gun and the flag.
Locally, residents and workers in the district want the flag gone.
“The flag is the physical representation of [America’s] supremacy background,” said American University student Leayrohn King, 18, who grew up on the U.S. Virgin Islands.
King, who is black, said the flag still carries racist symbolism outside the continental United States. The movement supporting the flag is like an uprising of those trying to return to a time when white supremacy was “true and apparent,” King continued.
Jarvis Armstrong, a 30-year-old black man who grew up in Washington D.C., echoed King. The flag is “a symbol of white America,” Armstrong said.
The flag still is displayed on the lawn of the South Carolina capitol building 150 years after the collapse of the Confederacy. And calls for it to be taken down have grown in the wake of the shooting.
“It’s very surprising that it’s still there,” said David Kearns, 40, a white man from New Jersey.
The biggest problem is that the flag remains tied to the government of South Carolina and not just its residents, well after slavery and segregation ended said Steve Monroe, 66. Monroe grew up in Washington D.C. but lived in Indiana for a brief period.
The flag, Monroe said, has become a symbol taken on by other places outside of the South and stands for something “racist and hateful.”
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley hinted on Twitter on June 22 that the flag could be coming down soon, tweeting “…our state Capitol will soon fly the flags of our country & state, and no others.”
People were quick to blame the flag for Roof’s actions, but others including Monroe and Jody Dixon, 29, said the flag alone couldn’t have spawned the shooting.
“It’s definitely a symbol of oppression,” said Dixon, who is black. Dixon said getting the flag down would be a victory.
The flag is a “symbol of the past” said William Fells, 18, who is black. He continued, “It makes a lot of people feel unwelcome and uncomfortable.”
Heather Cox Richardson, a 19th-century America historian and professor at Boston College, says the flag still represents the same sentiments that it did at the end of the Civil War.
“The flag represents opposition to an active national government,” Richardson said in an article published in June on the Boston College Office of News and Public Affairs website.
“Roof believes that whites should control the government,” Richardson continued, “just as white southerners believed after the Civil War. In that era, they organized the Ku Klux Klan to keep the government in the hands of white people. We’re looking at the same issue now. African Americans, women, and minorities are demanding a say in the American government and there’s a significant part of the population that thinks that’s a really bad idea.”
Roof was reported to have told his victims that blacks in the U.S. were gaining too much control.
“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” Roof reportedly said in the church during the shooting rampage, according to Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of one of the shooting victims, who told NBC News she had spoken to a survivor.
Back in Washington D.C., opposition to the confederate flag and horror about Roof’s actions remained strong nearly two weeks after the shooting.
The flag is “clearly a symbol of something negative,” said Paula Warrick, 51, who is white.
Warrick spent several years growing up in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she said the flag was displayed prominently on cars and homes.
“The flag is an ingrained symbol of racism,” Warrick said.