If the Confederate battle flag is not about slavery but about Southern "heritage"

[MADem]

1. It's the "heritage" of telling the federal government to "go f-ck yourself" in 1961.

That stupid flagpole was slapped up there when those meanie feds told them that segregation wasn't cool and they shouldn't do it anymore.

What a heritage!!

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/us/south-carolina-confederate-battle-flag-journey/

After the Civil War, the battle flag mostly faded from sight. But little less than a century later, after World War II, the civil rights movement began to simmer, and the flag slowly reappeared. South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond ran for president as the face of the newly founded racial segregationist party, the Dixiecrats. He was often greeted at rallies with Confederate battle flags.

By the 1960s the civil rights movement was bursting forth. In January 1961 John F. Kennedy was sworn in as President, promising equal rights to African-Americans, and desegregation progressed. Three months later, on April 11, 1961, South Carolina hoisted the battle flag over the Capitol dome in Columbia to honor the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. And kept it there.

Political uproar over the flag over the dome grew. And in 2000, civil rights activists succeeded in lobbying to have the large Confederate flag removed from that prominent position. As a compromise, the legislature passed the 2000 Heritage Act, which had the flag raised next to a soldiers' monument and protect its position there. It required a two-thirds majority vote by the legislature to overturn it.