There is no question that the Confederate battle flag stands for white supremacy, intolerance and oppression.

The Stars and Bars, as the flag is known, was birthed in the days when Virginia and other Southern states separated from the United States and created a country built on the perpetual right to buy and sell human beings into slavery.

Our bloody Civil War secured our union and abolished human bondage while uplifting millions of people to the rights of citizenship. The Confederate flag then was reborn as the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups whose missions are to ensure black people forever submit to third class status.

Jim Crow segregation and the rejection of the nation’s credo that all people are created equal is the real “Southern heritage” such flag wavers cherish and defend. This is the flag that a murderer waved before he went to a Charleston, S.C., church to gun down black worshippers in a bid to rally other white haters to rise up and join the slaughter of African-Americans.

He failed.

Instead, his heinous act finally opened many people’s eyes to the reality of what this banner stands for. That includes South Carolina legislators, who had fought attempts by the NAACP and other groups to have the flag removed from the Capitol grounds. Last week, they overwhelmingly voted at the governor’s behest to remove it. The symbol of hate had flown over the seat of the state government since 1961 to demonstrate South Carolina’s defiance to federal efforts to end segregation in schools, in employment and in commerce.

How astonishing then, that hundreds of miles to the north, on July 9, the same day South Carolina voted to take the flag down, 100 members of Congress — all Republicans — were pushing to prevent the federal government from removing it from our national parks and cemeteries.

How sad that members of the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who led the nation in a war to save the union and emancipate slaves, are now rising up to defend the banner of the traitors who sought to dismantle our nation and the people who later imposed apartheid in our country.

We watched in utter dismay as these modern defenders of the symbol of racial hatred sought to use their muscle against a bill to fund the Department of the Interior, including the National Park Service. The bill included provisions that would have required the Park Service to ban the use of the Confederate flag on federal property, including national cemeteries. It also would have barred the agency from doing business with gift shops that sell items bearing the flag.

The provisions would have ended a longstanding policy under which the Park Service has allowed the Sons of Confederate Veterans to maintain Confederate graves in federal cemeteries and post the Confederate flag on the graves.

The House approved the inclusion of the provisions by voice vote. But then a California Republican put in an amendment to eliminate those provisions and restore the use of the Confederate flag on federal property. He later said he did it at the request of the Republican leadership who were acting on behalf of Southern colleagues. Fierce debate broke out; Republican leaders had to pull the bill because so many of the party’s members wanted to keep the Confederate flag flying and refused to vote for the bill without a provision assuring that would happen.

The lesson: The Klan doesn’t have to wear robes and hoods anymore. Its members, now dressed in suits and ties, hold seats of power in all levels of government.

On this vote and on many other important matters, we see a wing of the Republican Party that is enjoying a revival — the Know Nothings.

That faction was the creation of people frightened in the 1850s about the influx of immigrants from Ireland and Germany and the accompanying growth of the Catholic Church. While the name has disappeared, the faction’s modern adherents, such as Donald Trump, are the anti-immigration advocates who want to stamp out progressive moves that expand our freedom and liberty.

They are influential. Notice how other Republicans have kept silent, saying nothing about their party members’ defense of a symbol whose meaning no one can mistake.

Perhaps it was said best by Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus: “I think they (the Republican leadership) have not a clue as to what they should do now, now that they have shown the entire United States that they have yielded to a few racist Southern Republicans.”

Let us be clear. We are talking about eliminating this symbol of hate from public property. Despite our distaste, this racist banner still can be displayed on private property or carried on a private car. No one is stopping anyone parading with it, wearing it on their clothes or from tattooing it on their bodies along with hate symbols such as the Nazi swastika.

For us, the effort to keep the Confederate flag flying in spaces to which all taxpayers contribute speaks volumes about what the Republican Party really stands for.

We again call on public officials and people of conscience in Virginia to initiate and strongly support all efforts to remove the offensive banner and other racist symbols from all public buildings, streets and highways.

That includes removing the names of defectors to the Confederate States of America from Richmond area school buildings, a Downtown bridge and from U.S. 1, a major north-south roadway that runs through the city and the Commonwealth.

We also challenge the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus to put away their fear of rocking the cradle of the Confederacy and act to eliminate the state’s Lee-Jackson holiday for two of Virginia’s biggest traitors against the American government and its promise of equality for all people. It’s like having a holiday for Benedict Arnold.

We cannot change the course of history, but we can change today the path that will become history tomorrow. We need to honor the real heroes — both men and women — whom we want our children and grandchildren to believe are worth honoring.