That is more or less enough to explain why some people find the Confederate flag offensive.
FORBES: Greens And The Confederate Flag - Jill Stein Not Whistling Dixie
In South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African-Americans and white Americans.
The controversy over the Confederate flag in 2000 and the subsequent economic boycott by the NAACP drew national attention to racial tensions in South Carolina.
From this vantage, it might not seem so wise to keep waving the Confederate flag and pretending there is no difference between singing Dixie and We Shall Overcome.
They also agreed that the Confederate flag, which civil rights campaigners say is a symbol of repression, should be lowered in South Carolina - the only state still to fly the flag on its statehouse.
In the same press conference, Obama mentioned the ongoing challenges that slavery has caused the U.S. He praised South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for calling for the removal of the Confederate Flag from the state capitol grounds last week.
The Confederate flag has also become an issue in the Republican campaign, but both leading contenders, George W Bush and John McCain, have said it is up to South Carolina residents to decide whether the flag should fly.
By definition symbols convey meaning, and people therefore tamper with them at their peril (witness the mixed emotions of race and tradition when the Confederate flag is flown in the South, or the horror when some white supremacist burns a cross or daubs a swastika).
"In light of the thing that has happened with the terrorists, we thought we would fly the U.S. flag on the big pole in honor of the dead, " says Maurice Bessinger, a South Carolina restaurateur who had taken down the Stars and Stripes from flagpoles at his restaurants last year in protest of the removal of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina Statehouse.
She has been a steady advocate of the poor, and on one memorable occasion she faced down Senator Jesse Helms and shamed the Senate into killing legislation that would have renewed the patent on the old Confederate flag held by the Daughters of the Confederacy.
The state government building not far away carried the old Confederate flag.
"The demand is still there for the old Georgia flag (with the Confederate Stars and Bars), " says Pat Robinson, owner of Savannah Sails and Rails flag shop in Savannah, Georgia, whose stock of standard 3-by-5 foot American flags ran out soon after the September 11 attacks.
An apoplectic Governor George Wallace had closed the capitol, which brazenly flew a Confederate flag, to prevent the marchers from delivering a petition protesting voting discrimination.
He too had been involved in an attempt to take a Confederate symbol off the state flag and it cost him support.
It was Governor Barnes who had the Confederate symbol removed from the state flag in 2001, and Mr Morrow hoped he would now pay for it.
Violence broke out when one Klan sympathiser, trying to distribute white-supremacist literature, got on to the protesters' side of the barricade and ran into an anti-Klan group burning a Confederate flag.
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