Clarence Page

Could this, at last, be the end of the Civil War?

Or, as some fans of Southern heritage call it, the War Between the States?

Or the War of Northern Aggression?

That question came to mind as I watched South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Nikki Haley do what I thought I might not live to see a South Carolina governor do. She called for the removal of the Confederate flag that still flies on the state capitol grounds.

Standing with her were the state’s two Republican senators, Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham. All three had migrated over the weekend from positions of passive support to outright opposition to the flying of that flag over the birthplace of the rebellion that it represents.

Sadly, it took the massacre of nine people in Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to shock them and other leaders of goodwill to take this step, long-urged by African-Americans and others who see the flag as little more than a symbol of racism.

That’s an old fight that threatens once again to be an issue in the current presidential race. But if anything helped trigger a widespread change of heart after the horror at Mother Emanuel church, I think it was the stunningly heartfelt sentiments of the victims’ relatives who spoke directly to the accused gunman at his first court appearance and offered their forgiveness.

One by one, those who chose to speak offered him forgiveness and said they were praying for his soul and hoped he would repent, even as they described the pain of their losses.

How many of the rest of us, I wondered, would have the internal fortitude to show such grace in the face of immeasurable loss and injustice?

Memories of Nelson Mandela, who during his 27 years as a political prisoner in South Africa befriended his jailers, helped put forgiveness into perspective for me. “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom,” he said, “I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind I’d still be in prison.”

Old resentments helped bring the flag of the Confederacy back into official display on state flags in the South in the early 1960s, not so much to commemorate the Civil War as to signal a new rebellion against the Civil Rights Movement.

The political power of those old resentments explains why even Gov. Haley, the state’s first Indian-American governor, Sen. Scott, its first African-American senator, and Sen. Graham, its current presidential hopeful, all tried to tiptoe around the flag question until an unspeakable tragedy struck at one of the oldest black churches in the South.

If anything unites Southern culture, as my late Birmingham uncle used to tell me, it is reverence for the church and good, law-abiding churchgoers like those who were murdered in, of all places, a Bible study class.

I was reminded of a strikingly similar tragedy, the bombing by Ku Klux Klansmen of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls on a Sunday morning in 1963. As that church’s current pastor, the Rev. Arthur Price Jr., told a CNN reporter after the Charleston shooting, “The emotional impact, whether you’re talking about the black community or the white community, is it happened in a church, in a place that is out of bounds.”

Before the flag can come down, South Carolina’s state legislature will have to decide to do it with a two-thirds vote in both houses. That’s a big challenge for Gov. Haley and her allies. But changing times and the state’s need to attract business offer new incentives for South Carolinians to modernize their image — and to free themselves from the prison of a long-lost cause.