A politician from South Carolina defends the use of the Confederate Flag. I know, you’re not surprised.
Hailey made the outlandish statements on a talk show hosted by the conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.
“Nonsense,” the civil war historian Kevin M Levin wrote on Twitter. “Tell that to the white men who in 1920 forced a young African American man to kiss a Confederate flag before they lynched him.”
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union over the issue of yes, slavery, in December 1860 – and the first shots of the war were fired in the state in April of 1861.
The Confederate soldiers fought under the flag during the Civil War between 1861-65 fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy in the Southern United States. The Ku Klux Klan also currently adopts the use of the flag to terrorize and intimidate minority groups.
Undoubtedly, these statements were made to appeal to a constituency that honors a legacy of hatred and white supremacy with disregard for the victims of the Emanuel A.M.E Church who were senselessly slain.
Roof’s actions were synonymous with the actions used by the likes of the Confederate Army and Klu Klux Klan which used the flag to terrorize African-Americans in the South.
Roof’s manifesto and pictures of him posing with the Confederate flag were revealed on a website after the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston on 17 June 2015.
At one point during the interview, Hailey made claims that shooting had nothing to do with race – but it was the national media who propagated that narrative. However, these statements are the anthesis of what Roof wrote in a manifesto prior to the shootings.
“‘I have no choice,’ it states. ‘I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is [the] most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country,” Roof wrote.
The website also contained a manifesto filled with racist rhetoric about African Americans, Jews, and Hispanics”.
The modern Confederate flag began to gain widespread popularity and became a cultural symbol, primarily in the south, after World War II, just as the federal government began enacting civil rights policies promised during the reconstruction era.
Hailey also served as US ambassador to the United Nations for the Trump administration from January 2017 to December 2018.
The sentiments Nikki Hailey should have expressed
The confederate flag was never a symbol of simply honoring a heritage. The ‘heritage” universally been cooped by white nationalists who used the flag as a symbol of hate because that’s what the impetus of the flag was used for. But more importantly, let’s honor the victims of those who were slain by enacting gun control laws to prevent this type of tragedy from happening again.
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