S.C. Governor Calls for Confederate Flag's Removal

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Monday that the Confederate flag should be removed from the state’s Capitol grounds after a white man accused of killing nine African-Americans at a church last week was shown waving the flag in widely circulated pictures.

Haley, a Republican, had avoided the issue in the days following last Wednesday’s mass shooting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

Haley’s call for the flag’s removal represents a cultural shift that, though sudden, has been decades in the making, renewing long-standing debates over whether the flag honors South Carolina’s history or flies as a snapping reminder of a time when African-Americans were bought and sold in the slave trade.

“It’s time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds,” Haley said Monday, speaking to reporters. While many in her state consider the flag a part of their heritage, she said, “For many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally racist past.”

Supporters of the flag call it an emblem of states’ rights and constitutional liberty and argue the Confederacy did not exist to preserve the institution of slavery. But the flag’s designer, a Savannah, Ga. newspaper editor named William Thompson, wrote that the flag was in part meant to symbolize “the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior colored race.”

And from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights movement to the web site Dylann Roof published before his shooting spree in Charleston, the Confederate flag has been the default symbol of segregationists and white supremacists.

Haley said individuals still retain the right to fly the flag on their property, but said “the State House is different, and the events of this past week call upon us to look at this in a different way.”

Roof, the suspect in the killing of nine people during a prayer meeting at the church, reportedly confessed that he planned the massacre.

In an interview with NBC News, Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of churchs pastor, Clementa Pinckney, one of the victims, said she had spoken to one of the survivors who told her that before the shooting Roof had said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”