Posts published in “Day: June 24, 2015”

MERY, Ala. — With no fanfare, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley ordered the removal of four Confederate flags from a memorial at the Alabama State Capitol on Wednesday amid a growing controversy over their official display in the wake of the killing of African Americans at a South Carolina church.
The first to be taken down was the so-called battle flag, followed by the First National Confederate flag, known as the “Stars and Bars,” the Second National Confederate Flag and the Third National Confederate Flag. All four had been removed by 10 a.m.
“The governor does not want the flag to be a distraction,” said Jennifer Ardis, a spokeswoman for Bentley. “There are a lot of other things we are focused on. We have a tremendous budget issue.”
Five workers, including two wearing yellow “landscape operations” tee-shirts, unceremoniously removed the flags by first lowering separate flag poles, then unsnapping and folding up the individual banners. As a handful of photographers recorded the scene, the men worked quickly, without comment, then left the enclosed area around the monument, locking the gate to the small fence behind them.
The flags were hung at the Alabama Confederate Memorial in 1994, a year after then-Gov. Jim Folsom Jr., ordered the removal of a battle flag that had flown over the state Capitol since 1963.
Meanwhile, Sen. Thad Cochran, Mississippi’s Republican senator, said Wednesday that it is his “personal hope” that the state would consider changing its flag, which depicts the Confederate battle flag in its upper left corner.
“The recent debate on the symbolism of our flag, which belongs to all of us, presents the people of our state a opportunity to consider a new banner that represents Mississippi,” he said in a statement. He added that he agrees with his fellow senator from Mississippi, Roger Wicker, also a Republican, that “we should look for unity and not divisiveness in the symbols of our state.