COLUMBIA, S.C. — Dueling rallies are planned for the South Carolina State House on Saturday to mark the six-year anniversary of the removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds.
Some will be celebrating the flag that controversially flew on the Gervais Street side of the State House until 2015, while others will be celebrating its removal to a museum.
From 8 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., the north stairs of the State House will be sealed off for a Flags Across the South rally. The same group has reserved the space the previous two years, usually featuring the battle flag flying from a temporary flag pole for a handful of participants behind police barricades.
The event marks the anniversary of the flag's removal from its former perch beside the state Confederate Soldiers' Monument near Gervais Street. The flag was taken down with much pomp after legislators voted to send the banner to the State Museum in the aftermath of a racially motivated shooting in 2015 that killed nine worshippers in a historically Black Charleston church.
Photos of the gunman posing with the Confederate flag, including the one at the State House, led a two-thirds majority of the Legislature to decide to relocate the flag, which had flown there since a compromise measure removed it from atop the State House dome in 2000.
From 1:15 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, the State House will host a very different "flag removal celebration" hosted by the Columbia Racial Justice Coalition. That group has reserved the grounds in years past specifically to deny the space to flag supporters on the anniversary.
On the first anniversary in 2016, hundreds of people rallied at the State House in support of the flag at an event organized by the South Carolina Secessionist Party, a group that advocated South Carolina once again leave the Union. The Secessionists have since split up after the group's one-time leader fell out with other members over their expression of bigoted views, and a dwindling number of people have continued to rally at the State House in years since.
Both groups at the State House this Saturday applied for permits in line with a policy that allows the state Department of Public Safety to review potential conflicts between groups at the state capitol — a policy that dates to the flag's removal in 2015, when the Ku Klux Klan and a group affiliated with the New Black Panther Party held separate rallies on the same day on opposite sides of the grounds.
Last year's rally followed chaotic and at times violent protests in Columbia against the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd in police custody last summer, including a rally that ended with downtown shop windows being smashed and a police car set on fire.
That year's flag rally didn't feature such violent clashes, but one white man was arrested and accused of pointing a gun at a group of Black counterprotesters while driving by in his car on Gervais Street.
