A Little Rock store announced this week it will no longer sell the Confederate battle flag, and its owner said it "has become a hate symbol."
FlagandBanner.com owner Kerry McCoy said she's recently changed her mind about selling the flag. She pointed to recent local and international news stories in a Wednesday blog post, as well as the historical significance of the downtown building in which her business is housed. The Taborian Hall, located at 800 W. 9th St., is steeped in black history.
"Our vision has always been to bring people together and make it a safe place for everyone," McCoy wrote.
Following the deadly 2015 shooting of a black church in Charleston, S.C., she defended selling the Confederate flag. She said at the time it was a matter of free speech and her reluctance to censor what people can buy and sell.
Several large retailers, including Walmart and Amazon, stopped selling the flags days after the shooting, which left nine people dead.
But McCoy's view on selling the Confederate flag has shifted, she explained.
She pointed to an instance of the battle flag being hoisted alongside a Nazi flag in Canada, as well as a report this month of a Little Rock woman hanging a mannequin by the neck in a tree with the flag nearby.
"Historically, the Confederate battle flag had nothing to do with the Nazi’s," she wrote. "Now, it was being equated to a symbol used to incite genocide. I was taken aback."
In 2009, she began renovating the building's third floor to restore the Dreamland Ballroom, once a renowned performance hall for black entertainers and musicians in the 1920s and '30s.
Last year, Friends of Dreamland, a nonprofit McCoy started, received a nearly half-million dollar African American Civil Rights Grant for the project. The federal program aims to fund projects preserving African American history and their struggle to gain equal rights.
She said that also factored in her recent choice to stop selling the Confederate battle flag.
"The juxtaposition of trying to create a safe place on the third floor of my building and of selling what has become a hate symbol on the first floor of my building has made me reevaluate my 2015 decision," McCoy wrote.
It's something McCoy encountered before, she wrote. She said her store drew fire when it began selling LGBTQ flags, as well as when she continued selling French flags after the country declined to help the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003.
McCoy said the store still plans to sell the Bonnie Blue flag. She wrote that the unofficial flag of the Confederacy serves to honor people who died in the Civil War.
"I am a Southern Woman and in no way do I want to forget or dishonor our young men and families that gave so much, so long ago," she wrote.