Aug 17, 2015 Americans around the United State celebrated the permanent removal of the Confederate flag in South Carolina. Governor Nikki Haley signed into legislation the permanent removal of the battle flag from the state capitol grounds, after an emotional debate started by the massacre of nine black churchgoers last month.
The bill was signed into law in the State House Rotunda before an audience of legislators and dignitaries, on July 8th and the flag was taken off the next day.
The South Carolina House overwhelmingly approved the legislation after the state Senate passed it earlier in the week, also by a huge margin. Here’s what the governor said:
“I saw passions get high, I saw passions get low, but I saw commitment never ending,”
The flag will go to the “relic room” of a military museum in Columbia, the state capital.
“We are a state that believes in tradition. We’re a state that believes in history. We’re a state that believes in respect,” Haley said. “So we will bring it down with dignity and we will make sure that it is put in its rightful place,” she continued.
A spokeswoman Chaney Adams said South Carolina was planning to keep the flag relocation “as low-key as the national media will let us,”
The governor invoked the memory of the nine victims of the shooting whose deaths spurred the latest debate over the flag, saying that the ability of the victim’s families to forgive the shooter created a chain reaction leading to the bill’s signing. Nine of the pens she used during the bill signing will be given to each of the nine victim’s families.
“May we never forget the actions that those people took to get us to this point today,” Haley said
The flag was carried by Confederate troops in the 1861-1865 Civil War, and is seen as a symbol of racism and slavery by many, while others proudly hail it as an emblem of Southern heritage. It has flown at the state capitol for 54 years.