What’s in a flag — specifically, the Confederate flag, which will soon be removed from the grounds of South Carolina’s state capitol? The American and state flags there are flying at half-mast in mourning for the nine black Charleston residents shot dead at a prayer meeting last week. The perpetrator is yet another dead-eyed-young-white-male-loser, whose photo looks like the poster for yet another down-market-hot-summer-in-Hollywood thriller, perhaps to be called “Satan’s Spawn.”
The claim is that the flag stands for racism and rage, and as such may have inspired the killer, and this may have substance. But the fact is that while the Confederate flag flew over the capitol, the state underneath it has become one of the most diverse and least polarized states of the union, and perhaps the most tolerant.
Of the many cases of white-on-black deaths that have roiled the country in the past year, the massacre in South Carolina has been one example in which death united, and did not divide, the whole population. South Carolina has been the one state in the union in which black people seem to feel they have found justice. If what’s in a flag is what one sees in it, what some people saw may be wrong.
In 2010, the first Tea Party election, South Carolina chose 38-year-old Nikki Haley to become one of only six female governors, and the second governor descended from Indian immigrants (the first was Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, another southern conservative state). In the same year, Tim Scott, then 44 years old, defeated a son of Strom Thurmond in a primary election for Thurmond’s old seat in Congress, becoming the first black Republican elected to the House from the Deep South since Reconstruction.
In 2013, Jim DeMint left the Senate, and Governor Haley appointed Scott to replace him. In 2014, Scott won a special election, making him the first black person elected to the Senate from the old Confederacy since 1881. His margin of victory was 23 points. South Carolina is now the one state in the union whose top three elected officials include two racial and ethnic minorities and only one white male.
It is also the one state in which killings of black men by whites did not lead to violence. Black men died in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland and New York City, setting off riots and fierce confrontations. In South Carolina, ten black people were killed in two incidents, setting off bi-racial mourning. In both incidents, the perpetrators were quickly arrested and face trial.
In 2010, George Will wrote that while California had changed for the worse, South Carolina had changed for the better more than any other state in the union in the current half-century. Perhaps the flag’s sinister impact has been somewhat less than was thought.
The fact that South Carolina had clung to the flag while wisely dismissing what the flag stood for is what made this story so strange. In polls taken last year, white South Carolinians said they supported keeping the flag by a three-to-one margin. As the state is so red and deeply conservative, most of these had to be Scott and/or Haley supporters, suggesting that they saw no contradiction in flying the banner while voting dark-skinned men and women into high office not once, but twice.
What they feel for the flag eludes this writer, whose ancestors fought for the Union and who grits her teeth driving the stretch of Route One in Northern Virginia named for Jefferson Davis. But it seems not to be the malevolence wished into their minds by many observers, who might do well to consider whether they are mistaken.
What is it that South Carolinians know that people in Maryland, New York and Missouri do not?
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
