As South Carolina honors victim, Alabama lowers Confederate flags

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Confederate flag flew high Wednesday outside the South Carolina State House, but a large drape kept mourners from seeing it as they filed past the open casket of a veteran black lawmaker and pastor.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley became the first Southern governor to use his executive power to remove Confederate banners, as four flags with secessionist symbols were taken down Wednesday from a large monument to rebel soldiers outside that state’s Capitol.

In South Carolina, making any changes to “heritage” symbols requires a two-thirds supermajority of both houses of the Legislature, and while lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for a debate later this summer, few wanted to risk ugly words during a week of funerals.

Other conservative Republicans then spoke up, and by Wednesday, both of Mississippi’s U.S. senators endorsed removing the Confederate symbol from the flag the state has flown since Reconstruction.

Lawmakers and activists around the nation took aim at other symbols, from a bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee’s Senate, to a sculpture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky Rotunda, to the vanity license plates used by thousands of motorists in various southern states.