South Carolina lawmakers compromised in 2000 by moving the Confederate battle flag off the top of the capitol dome and installing another version a few hundred feet away at the memorial to Rebel war dead.
So got moved from the top of the Capitol building to basically in front of it. It stands on State grounds, which is probably what pisses people off. I agree with those that say it belongs in a museum somewhere, not displayed publicly on State property.
The battle flag was never adopted by the Confederate Congress, never flew over any state capitols during the Confederacy, and was never officially used by Confederate veterans' groups. The flag probably would have been relegated to Civil War museums if it had not been resurrected by the resurgent KKK and used by Southern
Dixiecrats during the 1948 presidential election.[SUP]
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It is no accident that Confederate symbols have been the mainstay of white supremacist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the skinheads. They did not appropriate the Confederate battle flag simply because it was pretty. They picked it because it was the flag of a nation dedicated to their ideals: '
that the negro is not equal to the white man'. The Confederate flag, we are told, represents heritage, not hate. But why should we celebrate a heritage grounded in hate, a heritage whose self-avowed reason for existence was the exploitation and debasement of a sizeable segment of its population?[SUP]
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