Daily Mail – by MIA DE GRAAF and KIERAN CORCORAN
Hundreds of people have staged rallies across America in support of the Confederate flag as senators across the south agree to remove it from public buildings.
The controversial banner has been falling along the Bible Belt since the racist church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina.
And an activist was arrested on Saturday after climbing up the flagpole in Columbia, South Carolina, to personally take it down.
But in a show of force, Southerners came out in their droves this weekend to defend the 150-year-old battle symbol.
‘We are being exterminated,’ cried Mike Williams, organizer of the procession in Montgomery, Alabama, which drew scores of men, women and children on Saturday afternoon. ‘Our heritage is being put into museum. We have a right to honor our history just like everyone else does.’
His words come amid a national push to denounce the flag, which many see as a symbol of racial hatred and pro-slavery.
The decades-old controversy was revived after 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who proudly sported Confederate flags on his car, shot dead nine black churchgoers in a racist massacre in a church last week.
Formerly the battle flag for the seven slave states during the Civil War, it became even more controversial during the civil rights movement when many southern states flew the flag in protest against integration.
Williams insists the flag has nothing to do with slavery or racism.
‘My people were not legislators or government people, they didn’t have slaves. They were warriors,’ Williams told the Montgomery Advertiser. ‘That battle flag went with them into war. That flag stood for them.’
Across the street, a group gathered holding Star Spangled Banners and signs that read ‘the Confederacy was treason’.
One woman decrying the Confederate flag told the Advertiser: ‘We’re not going to be intimidated by the Confederate flag that should have been taken down 150 years ago when they lost the war, because it was a sign of treason, so we want to come and show them our country’s true flag.”
Early on Saturday morning a black activist took matters into her own hands by scaling the flagpole at South Carolina’s Capitol in Columbia and taking down the Confederate flag herself.
The woman, Bree Newsome, 30, was about halfway up the more than 30-foot steel flagpole in front of the Statehouse just after dawn Saturday when State Capitol police told her to come down.
Instead, she continued up and removed the flag before returning to the ground.
While she was clinging to the pole with the flag in hand, Newsome shouted: ‘You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence.
‘I come against you in the name of God.
‘This flag comes down today.’
As she calmly descended the pole and lowered the flag into the waiting arms of police, Newsome said ‘the Lord is my light and my salvation’ and announced she was prepared to be arrested.
Newsome, who was decked out in climbing gear and wore a helmet during her courageous climb, and a man, James Tyson, who entered the wrought-iron fence surrounding the flag were arrested.
At another pro-Confederacy rally in Tampa Bay, Florida, the battle flag of the rebel South was out in force Friday night at a ‘Ride With Pride’ event attended by hundreds who wore and flew the controversial symbol.
On pick-up trucks, choppers, t-shirts and even inked onto demonstrators’ skin, the distinctive flag was repeated hundreds of times alongside combative slogans like ‘try burning this, asshole’ and ‘come and take it’.
Marchers in the ride, which featured some 300 cars, said that the aim was to celebrate southern heritage and show pride in their homeland.
One, Lexy Webb, told local news station WTSP: ‘It shows about the Civil War, that we lost, Southern states we lost, it leaves us with the pride we have in the South’.
Flying the flag has become especially controversial in recent weeks since a cache of photographs emerged showing killer Dylann Roof posing with the flag and visiting Confederate landmarks.
Roof, who gunned down nine black people after a Bible study group at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, also wrote admiringly of the rebel states’ slave-owning culture.
The flag has since been removed from the state capitol in Alabama, and legislators in South Carolina are in the process of removing it from their capitol as well.
In a eulogy Friday for one of the victims of the Charleston killings, President Obama called the flag ‘a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation’.
The 150-year-old flag was originally used as a Civil War battle flag by the seven slave states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) that broke away from the Union in 1861.
Due to the racist policies of those states, many calling for the flag’s removal say it symbolizes hatred and white supremacy.
It gained its modern meaning from the 1950s onwards when it was used in opposition to the Civil Rights movement that sought to end segregation and create equal right for blacks.
In 1962, when the civil rights movement was cresting and the president was putting pressure on the south to end segregation, South Carolina proudly flew the flag in protest.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141960/We-exterminated-Hundreds-rally-favor-Confederate-flag-guns-hand-activist-arrested-pulling-outside-South-Carolina-state-building.html#ixzz3eRxgIJwl
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race war or not. At this point, whatever it takes to get the NASCAR/College Football/beer drinking crowd, off the couch, is a good thing. For apathy, is even more dangerous, than our enemy (Zionists)
hopefully this propaganda will backfire on our oppressors. And instead, the american South will know which way to point their rifles, when the time comes.
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Nice distraction while the shit hits the fan eh?
yes, distraction and “divide and conquer” all rolled into one, and all started by an event that probably didn’t even happen.
‘Southern culture is being exterminated’
WRONG
Southern culture is only being exterminated on the Jew-TV, and a few Jew retail outlets, but as you can see by the people in the photos covering themselves in the Confederate flag, southern culture is alive and well.
Keep southern culture alive in the real world, and don’t allow the Jews to dictate what you think, and don’t allow them to tell you what’s popular, or what “the American people want”, because they’re full of shite.
This nonsense is forcing me to buy a confederate flag, and there are probably a lot of other Yankees buying them as well.
It’s rebel culture, and it extends far north of the Mason-Dixon line.
I think one point that everyone is missing is simply this: these “elected officials” are no more genuine than the ones in Washington, DC. As Henry has said many times: from the President down to the meter maid, they’re all corrupt. Therefore, it’s a surprise to no one that they support this stupidity. It’s also important to note that the high number of illegal aliens pumped into and shipped all over this country also accounts for the “voices” that support these ludicrous issues.
Yesterday I went to cafepress.com to order 2 bumper stickers. One stated that an ancestor died fighting for the South and depicting a fading half of the confederate battle flag. Another stated “If you think the civil war was over slavery your teacher deserves an F.” There was $7 shipping but a few minute s later I ordered a small battle flag sticker and instead of wanting to pay $7 shipping again, I emailed them to ask if they could combine the orders. I got an email stating they would have to cancel the order and I would need to reorder. They never replied to my reply to cancel so I called them. The rep said they couldn’t fulfill the order now anyway because it includes the “confederate flag.” My reaction was “Oh, so you guys are going to blindly follow the stupidity that the civil war was over slavery too? That’s ridiculous! I’ve order a lot from you in the past, but I will NEVER NEVER order from cafepress.com again!”
you have to be joking?!
like you, i’ve ordered from them in the past. Very very sad and pathetic.
maybe i need to do what i’ve been procrastinating, set up my own ability to design, print bumper stickers and t-shirts to supply the patriot movement. Don’t know what the expense of such an operation would be, however i expect there would be much demand.
note: am referring to ‘hardcore’ (ie Milita, anti-zionists) bumper stickers etc. Not the lukewarm garbage
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Does anyone know of ANY company with enough cajones to sell bumper stickers that might “hurt someone’s feelings?”