Bill Press: Take down the flag

A visibly angry President Obama entered the White House Briefing Room Thursday, the morning after nine African-Americans had been murdered by a young white supremacist in Charleston, S.C.’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

But, despite his outrage over yet another mass murder, this one so clearly racially motivated, the president’s comments on gun control were remarkably subdued.

{mosads}Unlike after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., there was no call to action. No angry attack on the gun lobby. No challenge to Congress. No “fierce urgency of now.” Gun safety was just something we’ll have to get around to — someday. 

“At some point,” Obama said, “we as a country will to have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” Politics today makes it almost impossible to enact any gun safety legislation, noted the president, but “at some point, it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it.”

Unfortunately, the president may be right about our inability to do anything about guns. But there is something we can do about the Confederate flag: Take it down. And put it in a museum of ugly racism, where it belongs.

It’s no coincidence that the Confederate flag, which flew over the South Carolina state Capitol until 2000 and now flies alongside the Confederate Soldiers Monument directly in front of the Capitol building, also appears on the website of suspect Dylann Roof. The Confederate flag is not, as some Southerners still insist, a symbol of courage, loyalty and pride. Maybe it once was, but today it’s become a symbol of white people hating black people, simply because they’re black. 

When I visited the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol a couple of months ago, I was shocked at the overt celebration of racism. 

There’s not just the Confederate Soldiers Monument and the Confederate flag; there’s also a statue of former Sen. Strom Thurmond, who famously said “all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” 

As if that’s not bad enough, there’s also a monument to former Sen. and Gov. Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, who, like Roof, bragged about killing as many black men as he could before they raped white women. 

Why honor either one of these ultra-racists?

Yes, there’s also, hidden in the back of the Capitol park, a monument to leading South Carolina African-Americans — but you’d need a bloodhound to find it.

There’s no known direct link between the South Carolina Capitol and the Charleston murders, of course, but the danger is self-evident. The very presence of the Confederate flag and monuments sends a clear signal that overt racism is not just past history. It’s still alive today. It’s still OK to hate, even to the point of violence. Just ask Dylann Roof.

The Confederate flag, Strom Thurmond’s statue, Benjamin Tillman’s monument — take ’em all down!

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of The Obama Hate Machine.