22 June 2015 - Confederate flag debate after Charleston
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After Charleston, Republicans Wade Into Confederate Flag Debate
Josh Mitchell (The Wall Street Journal)
The murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., has thrust the Republican Party’s presidential contenders into a discussion that many would seemingly like to avoid: the rightful place of the Confederate battle flag.
The issue was rekindled after the alleged killer in Charleston, a white man said to be harboring racist views, had an image of the flag on his license plate, and a website being investigated by authorities displayed photos of what appeared to be the 21-year-old waving Confederate flags. Many African-Americans and other opponents of the flag say it is a symbol of Southern oppression. In South Carolina, a state legislator has vowed to introduce a bill to remove the flag from in front of the Statehouse before the next legislative session.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, fueled the debate Saturday when he restated his long-held stance that the flag should be taken down.
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History
Jose A. DelReal (The Washington Post)
Longtime Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley on Sunday called for the Confederate flag, which hangs outside the South Carolina state capitol, to be removed and sent "into a museum,” calling it an "affirmation" of hatred.
“It sends, at best, mixed messages and, at worst, for hateful people like [accused shooter Dylann] Roof, it’s an affirmation because they have appropriated something and used it as a symbol of hatred. So I think that it needs to go into a museum and I think it will,” Riley told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
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Racism
Keith Boag (CBC News)
The president of the NAACP, Cornell Brooks, standing in sweltering heat on the sidewalk outside his Charleston office roared that the flag was "an emblem of hate … a tool of hate … an inspiration to violence."
You know the flag he means: the blue "X" with 13 white stars on a square red background. It is known as the Southern Cross; officially it is the Confederate Battle Flag.
Notoriously, it is also a symbol for hundreds of extremist groups across the southern United States, including the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet the flag flies proudly on the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia.
The offense is obvious. For African Americans and many others, the flag was the standard of those who fought to preserve what was known as their "peculiar institution" of slavery, and it continues to be a symbol of racist oppression today.
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Procrastination
Theodore Schleifer (CNN)
Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, two Republican presidential candidates courting the vote of social conservatives who play an outsized role in South Carolina, declined to voice their personal opinion on whether the flag should fly in Columbia, pegging it as a states' rights issues that doesn't rise to the Oval Office.
"It's not an issue for someone running for president," said Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas on NBC's Meet the Press. "Everyone's being baited with this question as if it has anything to do whatsoever with running for president."
"I'm not a South Carolinian," said Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, on ABC's This Week. "This is a decision that needs to be made here in South Carolina."
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"22 June 2015 - Confederate flag debate after Charleston", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), juin 2015. Consulté le 19/04/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/key-story/archives-revue-de-presse-2015/22-june-2015-confederate-flag-debate-after-charleston