*The South Carolina Senate has voted 37-3 to remove the Confederate flag from the pole on Statehouse grounds. …Now, it’s up to the House.
The bill to remove the flag and the flagpole where it flies must pass a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly before it reaches Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk. The House vote is likely to be held Tuesday.
And as the debate got underway on Monday, about a dozen protesters gathered outside to voice their support or opposition to taking down the flag, with verbal confrontations between the two sides at times heating up.
Faith leaders also gathered in the rotunda of the State House, singing “Amazing Grace” and encouraging individuals to find unity through faith.
Rev. Jesse Jackson also took to the legislature to sit in the House gallery and observe the flag debate.
South Carolina lawmakers raised the Confederate emblem over the State House in 1961. For nearly 40 years, it flew under the U.S. flag and the state’s palmetto flag atop the Capitol dome until a compromise moved it to a flagpole next to a soldiers’ monument.
That move didn’t satisfy opponents, who maintain the flag’s display on the grounds amounts to tacit state endorsement of white supremacy.
But efforts to remove it had gone nowhere until last month, when nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston were shot and killed during Bible study, including the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who also was a state senator.
After the accused shooter, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, was arrested the next day in North Carolina, a website surfaced showing a racist manifesto and 60 photos of Roof, some of which showed him waving the Confederate flag.
The massacre reignited debate over the flag’s meaning and spurred politicians around the South to re-examine the placement of Confederate flags on everything from government property to state-issued license plates.
“The flag is the beginning; it can’t be the end,” Haley told “Today.”
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