Black female activist pulls down Confederate flag at SC Capitol
An African-American female activist has climbed a flagpole in Columbia and briefly pulled down a Confederate flag from in front of the South Carolina Statehouse.
State Capitol police told a woman, identified by a protest organizer as 30-year-old Bree Newsome, to come down the flagpole Saturday morning when she was halfway up.
However, the activist continued to climb up and eventually tore up the controversial emblem of the slave-holding south.
Newsom, and a man accused of assisting her, were arrested and charged with defacing a monument, authorities said.
“We can’t continue like this another day. It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality,” Newsom said in a statement released Saturday by the group Ferguson Action.
The Confederate battle flag was first raised atop the South Carolina State House in 1962, as part of the US Civil War centennial commemoration.
The Confederate States of America was an unrecognized confederation of secessionist states, whose agriculture-based economy largely relied upon the labor of black slaves.
The American forces supporting pro-slavery states carried the flag into battle during the1861-1865 American Civil War.
The Confederate flag has been brought to spotlight after an apparent white supremacist, Dylann Roof, opened fire at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week, leaving nine African-American worshipers dead.
President Barack Obama gave a moving eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, a black pastor at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal, who was among the victims of the shooting incident.
"We've been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation," Obama said on Friday. "The vast majority of Americans, the majority of gun owners, want to do something about this."
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