Arthur Ravenel, Jr., was a significant enough figure in South Carolina politics to have a bridge named after him. The sweeping eight-lane structure links downtown Charleston with the suburb of Mount Pleasant. It was there, on Sunday, that thousands of people linked hands to form a human chain meant to show that a racist accused of attacking a local church, leaving nine dead, would not divide them. Some held signs calling for the state to pull down the Confederate flag that flies on the grounds of the legislature.
What some of them may not know was that Mr. Ravenel, who served in the U.S. Congress and in state politics for three decades, was a staunch defender of that flag. As MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow observed, he spoke at a rally in 2000 in favour of keeping it flying. The backdrop was an enormous rebel flag. At the rally, he called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) "the National Association for Retarded People." According to the Charleston paper, The Post and Courier, he "apologized to people with mental and physical conditions and said his mistake was that he mixed up his words because he was thinking of another meeting he was scheduled to attend."
How things change. In 2000, and for years before and after, it was perfectly acceptable in U.S. politics to argue that the Confederate flag was merely a symbol of Southern pride. Countless politicians used that argument to wink at conservative, white Southern voters. It was a way of saying: In this dastardly liberal world where nobody thinks you count for anything any more, we have your back.
Now, with staggering suddenness, the defenders of the old flag are in full retreat. Politicians are falling over themselves to renounce the official use of the rebel banner. Many major retailers are taking merchandise bearing the flag off their shelves. Some states are talking about banning the Confederate emblem from licence plates, too.
The swiftness of the change is surprising because, for years, the flag debate simmered along at a low boil. Civil rights groups called the flag a symbol of a racist past. Defenders said it stood for "heroism, not hatred." The two sides were essentially at a stalemate. South Carolina's 2000 decision to remove the flag from the dome of the statehouse and raise it on a pole near a Confederate monument on the grounds was a compromise that acknowledged neither side expected a full win.
Last week's church attack changed everything. Dylann Roof, the man charged with opening fire on a Bible study group, showed up in online pictures brandishing a Confederate flag. That was a reminder that white supremacists and civil-rights-era segregationists used it as their emblem.
Alabama governor George Wallace had one by his side in 1963, when he vowed "segregation now … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever." When Martin Luther King, Jr., made his freedom trek from Selma to Montgomery, groups of young men bearing Confederate flags were there to taunt him.
As historian John Coski notes in his 2005 book The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem, "Civil rights leaders came to view the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of racism because they encountered it in situations in which white people intended it as a symbol of racism."
After segregation, the flag lingered because, as South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was careful to note on Monday, when she called for bringing it down at the statehouse, many white Southerners also saw it as a harmless historical relic or a symbol of regional pride. But the South is changing. Many northerners have moved there to retire or to seek jobs in its robust economy. The region has become a magnet for immigrants from Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world. Ms. Haley is an Indian-American, the first woman and the first member of a minority to be governor of South Carolina.
That means fewer Southerners trace their roots to the Civil War era and identify with the flag. "So this old Confederate reverence that was passed on from generation to generation has really weakened over recent decades," says Tony Horwitz, author of the 1998 book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.
That is changing the region's politics. In 2000, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain, said he did not want to weigh in on the flag debate because it was the state's business.
He later admitted he believed in taking down the flag, but avoided saying so to stay out of political trouble.
Today, Mr. Horwitz says, "Republicans are desperate to cleanse their image of being the white Southern man's party – so Republicans in South Carolina have had the courage finally to come out and say, 'Take it down.' "
Marcus Gee