By Laurence D. Schiller
Just before midnight on Wednesday, July 8, Republican Jenny Horne rose in the South Carolina House to make an impassioned speech on behalf of her Charleston constituents. She urged passage of a bill that would remove the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds, a flag that was first raised there in 1961 in defiance of the Civil Rights Movement.
“I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds … I’m sorry, I have heard enough about heritage,” said the descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
With that, after 14 hours of debate, the South Carolina House complied. On Friday, July 10, the flag came down.
At nearly the same time as Horne’s emotional speech, House Speaker John Boehner tried to sneak an amendment onto a National Parks appropriations bill that would have allowed Confederate flags and symbols to continue to be displayed in the U.S. Capitol and in our national parks. Southern Republicans had pushed for the amendment, unhappy with calls to prohibit flying Confederate flags from public buildings—calls arising from the massacre of nine innocents in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. But Democrats caught on and challenged the parliamentary maneuver. Caught off guard by the Democrats’ intense reaction, Boehner pulled the spending bill without a vote.
The next day, on July 9, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi introduced a privileged resolution instructing that
“the Speaker of the House of Representatives remove any State flag containing any portion of the Confederate battle flag, other than a flag displayed by the office of a Member of the House, from any area within the House wing of the Capitol or any House office building, and shall donate any such flag to the Library of Congress.”
(For the entire text of Minority Leader Pelosi’s resolution)
Pelosi’s resolution includes a statement of the historical fact that the Confederacy was a domestic insurrection against the United States and reasonably concludes that, as we do not allow the symbols of other groups opposed to the United States to exist in our public buildings and parks, we should not allow the symbol of the Confederacy to be displayed either. The flag in question, a rectangular variant of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag, was resurrected in the mid-20th century by Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats and the Ku Klux Klan with but one purpose in mind: to oppose rights for Americans of African descent.
Before a vote could be taken on the question of barring this symbol of hatred from the Capitol, Republican whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) moved to refer the resolution to the House Administration Committee for “committee action.” This was the very procedure McCarthy had used to kill a virtually identical bill that Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the sole African American member of the Mississippi delegation, had introduced days after the Charleston church massacre.
Pelosi countered by calling for a roll-call vote on whether to refer her resolution to remove Confederate flags from the Capitol to committee rather than vote on the resolution itself.
At this historic moment, 10th District Congressman Bob Dold could have stood up against hatred, against the symbol proudly waved not only by Charleston killer Dylann Roof, but also, for decades, by groups opposing civil rights, including the KKK.
But Dold remained seated. He spinelessly went along with his party and voted to consign Pelosi’s resolution to committee oblivion—and thus to retain the symbols of hate within the U.S. Capitol.
History rarely gives a man the chance to stand up and be counted. Dold failed to seize his moment. He failed to do the right thing for his constituents and his country.
Shame on you, Congressman Dold!
A Look at the History of Flags of the Confederacy
The flag that has been flying from so many public buildings in the South since the mid-20th century, which has mistakenly been referred to as “the Confederate flag,” was never the official flag of the Confederacy. Nor is that flag properly called “the stars and bars.” “Stars and bars” refers to the first national flag of the Confederacy, with its three bars of red, white, and red with a blue canton with stars in the upper left hand corner. (For more about historic Confederate flags)
The flag that the Ku Klux Klan used to terrorize African Americans wasn’t adopted until the mid-20th century. It is a rectangular variant of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag. The late Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina helped make this battle flag a symbol of the old South’s opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
Strom Thurmond’s son Paul is now a member of the South Carolina Senate. History came full circle in late June when South Carolina State Senator Paul Thurmond publicly supported an end to flying this flag.