Confederate flag supporters, opponents brawl at South Carolina capitol

Local news footage showed about 30 flag opponents, most of them black, clashing with roughly 10 flag supporters, all of them white. Mothers pulled children away as brawlers spilled into the street. WLTX noted two significant exchanges of punches, but no weapons were seen.

Chris Sullivan, a flag opponent, said his side was dedicated to nonviolence. 

“We'll be peaceful, but if any aggression is shown towards us, as a human being, as a man, we're going to defend ourselves,” Sullivan told WLTX. “That's why none of us were arrested tonight but the other side was.”

Josh Clark, a Confederate flag supporter, told WLTX, that he hadn't anticipated the outbreak of violence. 

“I’d rather start a discussion and a dialogue logically rather than have people yell in our face, beat us and steal our flags,” He said.

“If they are about peace, if they want people to listen to their message there's a way to do that and that's peaceably protesting,” said Clark, who wore a Confederate flag t-shirt.

The controversial flag flew over battlefields during the Civil War, and has also long been a part of rallies held by white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, a notorious hate group founded by a defeated Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest.

According to the Post and Courier, a local Charleston newspaper, the KKK plans to hold a pro-flag rally at the statehouse on July 18, one month and one day after Roof allegedly killed nine churchgoers, including state senator Clementa Pinckney, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Despite the flag’s history, many of its supporters insist that it has no connection to racism.

“The blood on my face, the blood in my teeth, the blood on my hands is no comparison to the Southern blood that runs through my veins,” Joe Linder, a Confederate flag supporter who was hurt in Monday’s scuffle, told WLTX.  “I am proud of my heritage, I am not ashamed, and more than all, racism has no part in that flag.”

The flag started flying atop the South Carolina statehouse in 1962 as a display of defiance against federal attempts to desegregate public spaces and schools in the South. In 2000, outcry from the NAACP and other groups forced the legislature to reach a compromise, removing the banner from the capitol dome and placing it on a memorial to Confederate soldiers near the statehouse.

“That flag just does not deserve to fly at all in South Carolina, and we want it down because we just think it’s disrespectful to us that we’re still flying it,” flag opponent Brennan Johnson told WLTX. “It does represent slavery, it doesn't matter how much they say it doesn't but it does, it does. And it's crazy. We’re not here for violence at all. We’re not. We just want the flag down.”

The cultural tide appears to have rapidly turned against the flag since the attack at Emanuel AME, with major online retailers, including Walmart, pulling it from store shelves. The National Park Service, a federal agency that oversees about 70 Civil War battlefields, has requested souvenir vendors remove products featuring the flag in ways that lack educational value, like on belt buckles.

Also calling for the flag’s removal are South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Republican State Sen. Paul Thurmond, son of late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, an ardent supporter of racial segregation. 

The South Carolina state legislature is set to start debate next week on removing the banner from state grounds. A survey of lawmakers by the Post and Courier found Monday that at least two-thirds of the state’s General Assembly would vote to take the flag down.