COLUMBIA, S.C. -- The Confederate battle flag no longer flies at South Carolina's Statehouse. It's now relegated to a room filled with other relics of the state's secession.
Several states have taken or are considering taking action to remove the flag and other Confederate symbols and monuments since the massacre of nine people at a Bible study inside a black church in Charleston. Police have charged a man shown in pictures with the flag. They say he was motivated by hate.
The Confederate flag has been banished from Alabama's Capitol and federal cemeteries, and Memphis officials are working to move the remains and a statue of slave trader and Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest out of a prominent park.
Still, the South is full of monuments to key players in the Confederacy and even to the Ku Klux Klan. Confederate flags remain a common sight on license plates in the South, and the battle flag is a part of Mississippi's official state flag. Georgia's state flag is based on the national flag of the Confederacy known as the stars and bars.
Large numbers of flag supporters, who say the battle flag symbolizes Southern heritage and history, remain. North Carolina sold out of its version of Confederate license plates when Gov. Pat McCrory said the state should stop selling them. No action has been taken yet to halt those sales. Sons of Confederate Veterans groups in states that include Georgia and Virginia have pledged to fight to keep them.
Chad Haden, 34, of Braxton, Miss., said many flags have flown for nations that allowed slavery, including the U.S. flag. Haden said one of his ancestors fought for the Confederacy.
"I've got to question the motive of it, of why they come after us? It's like they're trying to take one bad thing from us, slavery, and they ignore the progress that was made before the war. They try to make us the villain. I've got a question: Is it just a hatred of Southerners?"
Top Republicans in Mississippi, including the House speaker and both U.S. senators, have pushed to follow South Carolina's lead, though Republican Gov. Phil Bryant has said he won't call a special legislative session to consider removing the battle flag from the state flag. He has pointed to a 2001 vote in which supporters of the flag outnumbered opponents 2-to-1.
Bryant, his lieutenant governor and every member of the Legislature are up for re-election this fall. Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP, has called on Bryant to take action.
"It's time to write the next chapter of our history," he said last week.
Some public officials are already opting to fold up the flag. Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett, a white Democrat who was elected two years ago in a majority-black city, ordered the state flag removed from a pole outside City Hall early this month.
"We need a flag that unites and not divides," he said.
Georgia's state flag long resembled the Confederate stars and bars until 1956, when the design prominently incorporated the battle flag design that was removed from South Carolina. That was widely believed to be a protest to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ordered the desegregation of schools.
In 2001, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes signed a law ordering a new flag that prominently featured the state seal against a blue background. Much smaller images of the older, Confederate-inspired flags of the past were shown beneath, above the words "In God We Trust." That design lasted until 2003, when Barnes lost re-election and his Republican successor signed a bill into law restoring the stars and bars-inspired design.
Other efforts to change the flag failed.
Democratic state Sen. Vincent Fort, who is black, plans to introduce legislation to end Georgia's commemoration of Confederate holidays, which are commonly observed by governments in the South. However, many of his Republican counterparts in the GOP-dominated Legislature and the governor have shown little appetite for taking up such issues.
"We will take our first bite at the elephant and digest it one bite at a time," Fort said last month.
In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley made it a priority for lawmakers to pass legislation to take the flag down, reversing course from her 2014 campaign trail dismissal of Democratic challenger Vincent Sheheen's call for its removal as a campaign stunt.
On Friday, she told NBC's Today show that it was crucial to remove a symbol considered an emblem of slavery by many, saying "no one should ever drive by the Statehouse and feel pain."
Information for this article was contributed by Emily Wagster Pettus of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/12/2015