
The South Carolina state house isn’t the only public place that has taken down its Confederate flag.
All of the Confederate flags that used to fly over Fort Sumter National Monument — where the first shots were fired — were removed late last month, a National Park Service spokesperson, Kathy Kupper, said Friday.
The moves, prompted by the racist hate killings of nine African Americans in a Charleston, S.C. church on June 17, came as leading retailers (Wal-Mart, Sears, Amazon.com) decided to no longer sell the flag and major manufacturers (Annin Flagmakers, Valley Forge Flag ) said they would no longer make it.
“Any (national) park that flies a version of a Confederate flag may do so only if it is in historical context,” Cupper said.
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The flag is also disappearing from the shelves of stores in national parks, including parks devoted to Civil War themes.
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Eastern National, a nonprofit that operates a total of 300 stores in 160 national parks in the eastern half of the country, has pulled Confederate flags, magnets, lapel pins and such from its shelves. (Items that include the flag within a broader, historical display in books or videos, remain.)
The decision to discontinue came after several park superintendents asked for that action, according Kevin Kissling, Eastern National’s chief operating officer. Kissling, in a statement to the Loop Friday, said the move “was based on it’s potential for being offensive to a large segment of Americans.”
Eastern National has some 33 stores in 19 parks that have the Civil War as their primary theme, he said, such as Antietam and Gettysburg.
Still unresolved, as our colleagues Paul Kane and Abby Phillip report, is a House dispute over a proposed amendment to an appropriations bill that would permit people to bring flags to national cemeteries, such as in Vicksburg, Miss. and Andersonville, Ga., in a yearly event where volunteers place flags on the graves of rebel soldiers.
The House had already voted to remove the flag or its emblem from national parks.
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