Episode 1

♪ [somber music] ♪ ♪ [tense music] ♪ <Malcolm Graham> There was a crawl on the TV screen...

Shooting at Emanuel AME Church.

<Sen.

Gerald Malloy> I immediately called Senator Pinckney.

I didn't get him.

<Rev Joseph Darby> I called again in about 15 minutes and his voicemail was full.

<Jennifer Pinckney> When I heard the first three shots, I thought it was a generator.

[multiple gunshots] <Malcolm Graham> My niece called and said that we can't find Aunt Cynthia.

We think she went to Bible study.

<Jennifer Pinckney> I was about to make a run for it and the bullets came into the office we were in.

<Malcolm Graham> Over 70 shots were fired.

And Cynthia got 11 of those.

<Reporter> Officers on Calhoun Street continue to push the crime scene back.

<Reporter> At this point, we are waiting to hear from law enforcement to give us a briefing on exactly what happened.

[Crowd praying] <Malcolm Graham> What happened that night was an execution.

<Policeman> Gray sweatshirt, possibly hoodie, blue jeans, Timberland boots, and he's clean shaven.

<Mayor Joe Riley> The only reason someone could walk into church and shoot people praying is out of hate.

The only reason.

♪ [tense music] ♪ ♪ <Jennifer Berry Hawes> Charleston is a very historic city by American standards.

♪ [soft music] ♪ There are many large, beautiful, well preserved historic homes.

There are carriage horses and oak lined alleys with Spanish moss and all the kinds of things that people imagine when they think of an old antebellum city.

A lot of people would credit its transformation to Mayor Riley.

<Mayor Joe Riley> And back when I was elected, it was a city that needed a lot of work.

In some ways it hadn't been discovered yet.

♪ What cities need is a positive energy.

<Rev Cress Darwin> People describe Charleston as a place where you come to a four way stop.

And everybody stops and then start saying, "Well you go".

"No, you go".

"No, that's alright, you go".

<Jennifer Berry Hawes> 7 million or more tourists a year come to Charleston and it is not a big city.

<Rev Cress Darwin> There's civility.

There's gentility.

But also there's other things that make Charleston a challenge.

<Rev Nelson Rivers> Growing up in the city of Charleston, racism was like furniture.

It was everywhere.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Malcolm Graham> My mom used to call Charleston nice, nasty.

Nice on the outside.

And then you start peeling away the layers.

<Jennifer Berry Hawes> Charleston became very wealthy because it was the premier port for the importation of enslaved Africans.

And, in fact, historians estimate that about 40% came through the port of Charleston.

♪ [dramatic music] ♪ <James Clyburn> Most White people came to this country of their own free will in search of liberty.

Most Black people came to this country against their will and were enslaved upon arrival.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Jennifer Berry Hawes> You see symbols everywhere, streets named after Confederates.

In Marion Square, you had this enormous pillar and statue of John C. Calhoun.

♪ [tense music] ♪ What you didn't have was any sort of monument to the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people brought into this country through Charleston.

♪ And that in itself is a symbol.

The lack of.

[film projector rattles] ♪ [tense music] ♪ <Donald Livingston> No Americans have ever suffered so much and gave so much for any cause, not World War One, not World War Two, than Southerners did.

They lost a quarter of all men of military age.

That's tremendous loss.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Kathleen Parker> I think Walker Percy made an interesting point.

He said the South is unique because it's the only part of the United States that has known invasion and defeat.

<Jerry Mitchell> The South, I mean I think it was like one out of five people had limbs that were missing.

Mississippi had a huge amount of its budget that went just to artificial limbs.

Mississippi as a state was just devastated.

So here's like, per capita, the richest state in the country.

They go from number one to the lowest on the totem pole, which they've pretty much remained at ever since.

<William Cooper> The economy was wrecked, much of the landscape what we call infrastructure was torn up.

♪ [tense music] ♪ If you ask most White Southerners at the time, they faced an unprecedented world.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Jennifer Berry Hawes> When you don't have an economy, you don't have food to eat, you don't have any way to support yourself or your family.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <William Cooper> The value of slaves in 1860 was greater than the value of all the banks and manufacturers in the North.

Slavery had been around for 200 years.

It was gone.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Michael Green> The Confederate States of America only lasted four years.

But in those four years, they had three national flags and spent a lot of time deciding what their flags and their symbolism would be.

<John Coski> Confederates were still thinking of themselves as Southern Americans more than as Confederates per se, and they wanted a flag that retained the vestiges of the flag of the once happily united nation rather than ceding it to the Yankees.

As the war grew more serious, more bloody, Confederate nationalism grew.

A lot of Southerners asked the question, why do we have a flag that resembles the flag of the nation from which we're trying to secede?

It makes no sense.

<Michael Green> This actually became a problem on the battlefield when soldiers weren't able to know who was who.

They couldn't use the national flag.

So on the battlefield, they had to use regimental flags, battle flags.

<John Coski> One of them, chosen and used by the army that eventually became Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia is the flag that we know today as the Confederate Flag.

<Michael Green> Most people do not realize that the Confederate Battle Flag, never once represented the Confederate States of America.

The second flag of the Confederacy is the stainless banner because it is a mostly white flag.

And then it has the Confederate Battle Flag as a square canton in the top left.

On the battlefield, when there was no wind, you really couldn't see the canton and so it looked like you were just flying a white flag, which is the flag of surrender.

They added a red stripe to the fly edge of the stainless banner to now what they call the bloodstained banner.

This was in 1865.

The confederacy ended shortly after that flag was designed.

<Dr.

Adam Domby> Confederate monuments, they show up in cemeteries, cause they're really serving as memorials.

You're dealing with the death of a lot of people.

<William Cooper> They put up monuments to memorialize their ancestors, to memorialize themselves, to feel that what those people had done was worthy.

After the Civil War, in the South, the generals had a much more venerated place, a much more publicly praised place than any of the politicians.

<Dr.

Karen Cox> Robert E. Lee becomes lionized even though he says I don't think monuments are a good idea.

<Sen.

Kay Patterson> General Lee, who I admire, he's one of the best generals that America ever produced.

General Lee told them, furl the flag and put it away.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Jennifer Berry Hawes> The flag was raised in 1961 during a centennial commemoration of the beginning of the war.

♪ [tense music] ♪ You're talking about 1961, just months after the Friendship Nine, which is when African Americans went to sit at a segregated lunch counter.

♪ [somber music] ♪ <James Clyburn> That flag went on top of the statehouse at that time, and was supposed to be up there for one year.

<Bakari Sellers> It was placed up during a time in which we were making some civil rights progress.

And it was a big "... You" to those individuals who were out there fighting for the rights of Black folk.

<Todd Rutherford> That flag was a rally cry.

It was a living breathing example of the supremacy of Whites in the South and in particular, Whites in South Carolina.

<Sen.

Darrell Jackson> You have to understand the timing.

It wasn't put there in 1866 after the war ended.

To all of the people that say it's about the legacy of the Confederacy, it's about remembering history.

Well, they didn't care much about history for 100 hundred years prior to that.

♪ [somber music] ♪ [film projector rattles] <Jennifer Pinckney> The church is supposed to be open to everyone.

♪ [somber music] ♪ I was there along with my youngest daughter Melana.

She and I stayed in the pastor's study.

[gun shots] Just my mind was lock the door.

When I just snatched up Melana like she was a little rag doll, ran through his office into the secretary's office and I shoved her under the desk, and then I locked the secretary's door.

So it was dark in there.

[multiple gun shots] The bullets came through into the office we were in and I leaped in under the desk with Melana.

<Sen.

Gerald Malloy> She had the wherewithal to make a 911 call.

[police sirens] <Mayor Joe Riley> I asked the police officer, I said, "Has Senator Pinckney arrived yet?"

And he said no, Mayor Riley.

He said, "Senator Pinckney was in there".

<Rev.

Kylon Middleton> I immediately went to the Embassy Suites, got to Jennifer and as soon as I got to her, you know, Melana pressed herself up in my side, Jennifer buried herself in my chest, literally trembling on my side, Jennifer literally trembling in my chest.

[Crowd] Unintelligible <Rev.

Kylon Middleton> I would never forget that stench of fresh blood.

<Mayor Joe Riley> This is a most unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy.

We're going to find that killer and bring him to justice.

<Rev Cress Darwin> How does any institution recover when all of your leaders have been, have been killed?

♪ [piano music] ♪ ♪ [piano music] ♪ <Malcolm Graham> When I talk about my sister, Cynthia, it is with joy and pain.

She was the first in our family to go to college.

She loved to read.

I just loved her, right?

Everything about her.

She was just beautiful.

♪ <Bakari Sellers> Seems like every day you adding another name to the list of people that you're living for.

♪ [soft tense music] ♪ <Policeman> Ok, she said he's at Charles Road, headed towards Ingles.

<Policeman> Okay, okay.

I've got some officers out where Ingles is right now.

Black Hyundai, White male traveling westbound.

<Sen.

Gerald Malloy> I was there when they say we found a suspect and they got the person, which we later knew to be Dylann Roof.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Mayor Joe Riley> That terrible human being who would go into a place of worship when people were praying and kill them is now in custody, where he will always remain.

<Policeman> Ma'am, ma'am?

<Crowd> Dylann, what do you have to say?

<Todd Rutherford> Most things in this state relate back to the Confederate flag.

It is hard for us to get away from it because the bulk of our political fights have to do with race and class and why that flag went up in the first place.

<Sen Kay Patterson> When I came down here, I looked up there.

They had the American flag, state flag.

And then I saw the third flag, which was a Confederate Flag.

So when I got elected to this House, I got up there at the podium, and started talking about it.

I said, "Listen, I said, y'all flying the Confederate Flag "on top of the State House," I said, "That's not right."

They were saying how much they loved it.

I said, "I know you love it.

"I know that, but I don't love it."

<Todd Rutherford> When you said the Pledge of Allegiance and the prayer in the morning, you looked at the Confederate flag, and you did so in the Senate as well.

And there was one on top of the dome.

<Sen.

Darrell Jackson> And I sat right over here.

Every single day, I had to be reminded of what it meant to me and the pain that my ancestors endured.

<Rep.

Cobb-Hunter> I had flags on my desk, the American flag and the South Carolina flag.

And every day that I came in here, and we pledged allegiance to the flag, I would pledge allegiance to the flags on my desk, because I refused to pledge allegiance to that flag with that Confederate Flag up there.

[film projector rattles] <William Cooper> When you talk about Reconstruction, it's a very complex, difficult subject, the answers you get will depend on who you ask.

<Ben Jones> It wasn't like a Marshall Plan for seriously rebuilding the South and its economy and its infrastructure.

It was very punitive.

♪ [somber music] ♪ <George Conor Boyd> Federal troops came down here to Mississippi and other places in the south.

And the states stopped becoming states, they became military districts, and federal occupation happened and we were under occupation for way too long.

<Jerry Mitchell> It really didn't work out well.

<Dr.

Adam Domby> We knew slavery was dead.

But what else came with that freedom?

Would they be equal citizens?

That's not clear in 1865.

<Carl Jones> You've got a population of four, four and a half million slaves who are un-educated, who have no homes, no land, no resources, many of them no job skills other than manual labor.

How are they going to support themselves if we just overnight suddenly turn them loose?

<Dr.

Bobby Donaldson> Reconstruction was the regrouping and the rebuilding of the South, but also the reconstructing of Black citizenship.

<Dr.

Adam Domby> African Americans during Reconstruction are gaining rights, for the first time allowed to vote, freely get an education without any restriction, be economically independent.

And so it's a massive shift.

<William Cooper> By the mid 1870s, many Whites in the North also had become unhappy with the cost of Reconstruction.

<Dr.

Bobby Donaldson> 1877, the federal troops leave all parts of the South.

And many African Americans watch this with tears in their eyes, because they knew there walked their hope, there walked their promise for citizenship.

<Jerry Mitchell> Once the troops were gone, that was it.

There was a tremendous amount of violence toward African Americans during this period of time.

White Republicans at that point who kind of sided with African Americans, they were killed.

Twenty something people from the Reconstruction of Mississippi were killed.

<Dr.

Bobby Donaldson> African American schools are forced to shut down, African Americans began to lose their property, their right to vote.

In the General Assembly, where African Americans were the majority, you saw not one African American for nearly a century as a result of suppression of Black voters and this reign of terror.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Dr.

Karen Cox> You begin to have things like Black codes, which prevents freedom of movement.

They would enforce things that they called vagrancy laws.

If you couldn't show that you were gainfully employed, you could be arrested and forced to work.

It's this refusal on the part of Southern Whites to accept freedom and equality.

♪ [tense music] ♪ Once federal troops have left the region, monuments moved to public spaces.

They become much more publicly visible.

They end up on courthouse lawns, at state capitals, on university campuses.

<Rev Joseph Darby> We have monuments to people who committed treason.

Some folk will say, well George Washington owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.

Yeah, they did, but they never joined the Confederate States of America.

<Dr.

Adam Domby> The South has a reverence for memory more than I'd say it has a reverence for history.

<Dr.

Karen Cox> There was this man named Edward Pollard at the Richmond Examiner.

And in 1866, he published The Lost Cause.

He's the one who gave us the term.

In that book, it says it's a new Southern history of the war.

Well, the war's history hadn't even been written and he was already rewriting it.

♪ [soft music] ♪ There are a number of tenets of the lost cause.

The war was not fought over slavery but to defend states rights.

It's about slavery then, then you can't talk about these White men as heroes.

♪ [soft music] ♪ <Dr.

Adam Domby> It remembered slavery as a benevolent institution.

Slavery was in fact, a horrible institution premised on terror and torture.

♪ [soft music] ♪ <Dr.

Karen Cox> Reconstruction is referred to as the tragic era, giving African Americans citizenship.

<William Cooper> To me history is something to try to understand and to explain, understand why people did things.

That doesn't mean you condone what they did.

That doesn't mean that you agree with what they did.

<Carl Jones> We have to go back and judge them by the time in which they lived.

And when we do that, things become certainly more complex.

But I believe we draw from those a more honest conclusion of history.

<Maurice Hobson> It's the job of historians to make sure that the world remembers, the evil too, so that we won't repeat it.

<Dr.

Karen Cox> The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the UDC, as they were known, was founded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1894.

Just a group of 30 women.

Within 10 years that 30 became 30,000 women, and by World War One, they were an army of 100,000.

It's estimated that there are between 700 and 800 Confederate monuments throughout the region.

And the vast majority of those were built during the heyday of the UDC's influence between 1894 and World War One.

♪ [soft music] ♪ The unstated agenda, which I think is really important for people to understand, is that they wanted to vindicate the Confederacy, they wanted to vindicate their Confederate ancestors.

The UDC organized the Children of the Confederacy, which is a feeder organization for both the UDC and also the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

They make sure that schools have textbooks that have a pro Confederate version of the past.

<Jerry Mitchell> Up until the 1960s, they were taught what a great organization, the Klan was.

♪ [somber music] ♪ Students in Mississippi, White and Black studying and went, Oh, the Klan was a good organization.

<Dr.

Karen Cox> Dylann Roof didn't emerge out of thin air.

He had been influenced by the Lost Cause, He had been influenced by racist websites that he had dived into.

He's not an outlier.

[gunshot] <Jennifer Berry Hawes> He went on to Google, one day during the days of Trayvon Martin.

Apparently, when he typed in the words, Black on White crime, the Google algorithm led him to a number of White Supremacists websites.

And that's where he began to be exposed to radical people online.

[gun shots] <speaker> This is a young man, 21 years old.

I mean, he's a baby.

He not only took nine lives, but his life is over.

And surely his parents are saddled with heartbreak.

So there's, so this isn't just an African American issue.

It's an American issue.

<Interviewee> His motivations for the killings, according to his own comments to FBI agents, was that he wanted to wake White people up to this reality that he perceived.

<Jon Stewart> Nine people were shot in a Black church by a White guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of Civil War.

The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina.

And the roads are named for Confederate generals.

[multiple gunshots] And the White guy's the one who feels like his country's being taken away from him.

<Jennifer Berry Hawes> He began to adopt these symbols of the Confederacy.

<James Clyburn> This young man Dylann Roof was a worshipper of that flag.

<John Coski> I think the photographs of Dylann Roof, that with the Confederate flags and the visceral impact on the American public, makes them the most important photographs ever distributed of the Confederate flag.

<Ben Jones> To even comprehend what he did is evil.

A week or so later, somebody said, "Well here's a picture of him with a Confederate flag.

So therefore, the Confederate flag is bad.

Every kid in the South got a rebel flag.

<Larry McCluney> It made it seem like the flag caused him to do what he did.

It made it seem like you would argue that, that flag crawled down from that flagpole and went down there and shot those people.

Really?

<Ben Jones> I've have spent years defending this thing as a positive thing, as a healing thing.

And this jerk, you know, gets on some kind of dope, and goes - a horrifying, a horrifying thing.

<Dr.

Karen Cox> After the tragedy in Charleston, sales of Confederate Flags actually increased.

<Will Folks> There's always this knee jerk belief that someone who supports the flag is - is racist.

I don't think that's true.

<Sen.

Darrell Jackson> What I discovered, everyone who had some passion for the Confederacy, they weren't all racist, okay.

<Flag supporter> It is an honor, of the 64,000 men from South Carolina who served this state with valor and honor, and their memory should not be forgotten.

♪ [somber music] ♪ <Michael Green> If you look at the flags of all 50 states, there's a lot of variation in color and design.

But if you were to map them out, you see that the southeastern United States has a lot of similar colors and a lot of similar elements that harken to the Confederacy.

<Steve Murray> Many people are surprised to learn that Alabama did not have a state flag until 1895.

The sponsor of the legislation was the son of a Confederate officer.

The legislator wrote a design for the flag being the St. Andrew's cross, <Michael Green> You'll see a lot more saltires, which is the X on a flag.

And that of course, is a call back to the Confederate Battle Flag.

<Jerry Mitchell> Before the Civil War, Mississippi had kind of a Magnolia flag.

It wasn't necessarily that attractive, since 1894, the most distinctive part of the flag of Mississippi was a Confederate Battle Flag, and that was adopted in the wake of this new constitution.

This reassertion of White Supremacy.

<Michael Green> When you create any flag, you inevitably create an "in group" and an "out group", a group that's meant to be represented by the symbol, and then a group that inevitably isn't.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Larry McCluney> The Sons of Confederate Veterans is a fraternal organization of descendants of Confederate soldiers.

<Carl Jones> We're a civic group, essentially, and it's about protecting and defending our family, our history about defending the good name of the Confederate soldier.

<Larry McCluney> We're charged with preserving all the symbols, its monuments, the truth behind the cause they fought for, anything and everything that's Confederate.

<Jerry Mitchell> You can go to the Mississippi Capitol and there are statues not only to the soldiers, but to the women, the sisters, the mothers, everybody imaginable, they cover with the Confederate statues.

<Steve Murray> The monuments are not a single layered truth.

African Americans rightly see them as expressions of a sentiment that came from when this notion of the lost cause was prevalent.

They were also memorials to men and boys who were killed in battle.

And that is also a truth.

Those of us who work in history, those of us who produce documentary films have the challenge of trying to help the public understand those multiple perspectives.

<Michael Green> The Confederate battle flag that we know today kind of grew into prominence as people were making movies about the Confederacy.

Notably, the movie Birth of a Nation used the Confederate battle flag as sort of the symbol of the South.

And that directly led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

They picked up the flag as their symbol.

<Maurice Hobson> Even though Birth of a Nation is a fictitious kind of account of what happens in the Lost Cause, it becomes the number one recruiting tool for the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

♪ [dramatic music] ♪ <Maurice Hobson> Here in the state of Georgia, one of the locales of venues where the Klan would often meet would be Stone Mountain.

♪ [dramatic music] ♪ Stone Mountain is the largest stone edifice on the side of a mountain in the world.

And it is a depiction of General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Stonewall Jackson.

These edifices and these flags, these symbols, they're done to straight up promote an idea of oppression.

<John Coski> The association between the flag and the Ku Klux Klan is one of the most powerful for us today.

And a lot of people assume that the flag was used by the Klan from its earliest days in the years after the American Civil War.

From what I can tell that wasn't true.

The Klan did not use the flag in its 1860s, 1870s life.

The most popular symbol of the Klan in those days was the United States flag.

<Larry McCluney> When we say it's hijacked by hate groups, you know, well, the American Flag has been hijacked by hate groups.

Probably the largest Klan march in American history took place in the 1920s where almost a million Klansmen marched through Washington, D.C., and they were broke down by states.

Look at the flag that was carried by these people, it was the US Flag.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Carl Jones> If you go back and look at pictures of the KKK, prior to World War Two, you almost never see a Confederate Flag in the mix.

[film projector rattles] ♪ [calm music] ♪ <Sen.

Gerald Malloy> Clem was a calm voice in the Senate.

<Todd Rutherford> He didn't move fast.

He didn't do anything fast.

Everything with him was a very measured approach.

♪ [melodious music] ♪ <Bakari Sellers> He had this really big, booming voice.

<Sen.

Clemente Pinckney> Today, the nation looks at South Carolina.

<Sen.

Vincent Sheheen> A gentleman in the classic sense of the word.

<Sen.

Gerald Malloy> Clem's first calling was as a preacher.

<Sen.

Clemente Pinckney> Let me welcome you to Mother Emmanuel.

My name is Reverend Clemente Pinckney.

<Jennifer Pinckney> Clemente didn't write down his sermons, he would jot down a few notes, and he would speak from the heart, speaks at what God wanted him to say.

<Sen.

Clemente Pinckney> Many of us don't see ourselves as just a place where we come and worship, but as a beacon, and a bearer of what makes us a people.

<Antjuan Seawright> Perhaps the most powerful sermon I've ever heard Clemente preach was the life he lived.

<Sen.

Darrell Jackson> Clemente and I talked about, can a minister balance running for politics hold onto his integrity, make sure that he doesn't compromise his principles.

And I said to him, absolutely.

<Sen.

Clemente Pinckney> Our calling is not just within the walls of the congregation.

But we are part of the life and community in which our congregation resides.

<Rev Cress Darwin> Reverend Pinckney was a man of accomplishment.

When you spoke to him, you recognized and realized his commitment to his faith and certainly to his community.

<Sen.

Clemente Pinckney> When we first heard on the television, that a police officer had gunned down an unarmed African American in North Charleston by the name of Walter Scott, there were many who said, there is no way that a police officer would ever shoot somebody in the back 6,7,8 times.

<Sen.

Gerald Malloy> And Clemente went to the podium and told the story of Thomas, we would not believe it until we see the nails in his hands and the piercings in his side.

<Sen.

Clemente Pinckney> When we were able to see the video, I believe we all were like Thomas, and said, I believe.

<Antjuan Seawright> It was his speech that closed the deal to allow South Carolina to be the first state in the Union to have mandated body cameras.

It ended up being his last speech on this floor.

<Sen.

Darrell Jackson> The body camera legislation was passed in June and became law a few weeks before his murder.

♪ [soft music] ♪ <Sen.

Gerald Malloy> Clem was probably a prodigy.

♪ [soft music] ♪ [film projector rattles] ♪ [Newsreel fanfare music] ♪ <news announcer> America at war!

In New York mast flags leading 500,000 marchers in the greatest patriotic and military demonstration ever seen in this or any country.

[drum roll plays] <John Coski> The World War Two period was extremely important in the flag's evolution.

A lot of White Southern men who entered the army and started mingling for the first time with people who didn't sound like them, who didn't have the same background.

And it intensified a sense of themselves as being different, as being Southerners.

And they looked for some kind of totem that spoke to their Southern- ness, and the Confederate Flag proved to be that thing.

The flags, generally were considered to be harmless enough, old gestures of Southern pride and Southern identity.

<Harry Truman> We must entrust our destiny to those who will safeguard our rights, our freedom, and our national honor.

<James Clyburn> 1948, I got caught up in Truman's race.

Nobody gave him a chance to win.

He had a physical handicap with his eyes.

He didn't have a college degree, didn't have a middle name.

He was just not the kind of guy that would get elected president.

He's running against Thomas Dewey, very wealthy New York family, big time name, and Harry Truman won.

And that's where I got this love of politics from.

♪ [dramatic music] ♪ <John Coski> 1948 is such an important moment for the flag because it announced its new life as a political symbol of protest against integration.

After Truman and the Democratic Party adopted a very strong civil rights platform, the Dixiecrat Party nominated Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President.

[crowd applause] <Dr.

Bobby Donaldson> When Strom Thurmond says no troops will prevent us from maintaining the status quo, right behind him... is the Confederate flag.

<Michael Green> If it wasn't for the southern Dixiecrat party using the Confederate Battle Flag as their symbol, this flag would be just a footnote in some Civil War Museum somewhere.

<John Coski> Many of the delegates to that convention were college students who were already accustomed to using the Confederate Flag in their collegiate rituals and at football games.

♪ [stately music] ♪ Kappa Alpha fraternity was founded at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, in 1865, when a certain former Confederate General Robert E. Lee was president of the college.

And the Confederate flag became part of its symbolism and part of its ritual, and almost certainly, Kappa Alpha was the instrument that introduced the Confederate flag into college culture.

♪ [stately music] ♪ <TV announcer> 12 African Americans welcomed Dylann Roof into their Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina.

He shot nine of them dead.

Now 12 people, some White some Black, will decide whether Roof lives or dies.

♪ [somber music÷} ♪ <Malcolm Graham> I was at the trial every day.

<Television Reporter> In opening statements, the US Attorney spoke eloquently saying that parishioners welcomed 22 year old Dylann Roof to their Bible study, But little did they know how cold a heart he had.

<Malcolm Graham> They showed a video at the trial from the security camera of everybody coming into the church.

And to see Cynthia get out of her car, to see her being greeted by Reverend Pinckney outside, to see her have her poster board that she was doing for the history of the church.

And her showing him the board and they're laughing.

And then watching both of them walk in the church together.

It's the last time I saw my sister alive.

♪ [somber music] ♪ Seeing him in the courtroom trying to defend himself, ♪ [tense music] ♪ no remorse...not caring.

Just made me sick.

<Sen.

Gerald Malloy> When Polly Shepard testified it's one of the most unbelievable moments that you would ever see in a courtroom.

She testified at trial and I paraphrase, He put that gun in my face, looked at me in my eyes and told me, I'm not going to kill you.

I need someone to tell the story.

And, she said and I'm here to tell the story.

♪ [somber music] ♪ The defense counsel came up to cross examine her, looked at her gave a slight bow.

and said I have no questions.

I'm very sorry.

When she stood up to walk from that witness chair.

The whole courtroom stood up and watched her walk back to her seat.

Now I've been a lawyer for 30 years.

You'd never seen a moment just like that.

[film projector rattles] ♪ [piano plays] ♪ <John Coski> African Americans were conscious of it becoming a more visible symbol in American life.

And they objected to it on two grounds.

One, that it was a symbol of divisiveness at a time when the United States needed to be more united than ever in the Cold War.

But they also recognize that it was becoming powerful symbol of segregation-ism.

<Dr.

Cleveland Sellers> They kept the flag alive so everybody would know that we're still operating by the same old rules.

And that's called segregated etiquette.

If you walking down the sidewalk, look down at the foot.

So that you wouldn't look them in the eye because making eye to eye contact was considered to be belligerent.

So get off the sidewalk and let the White family pass by.

<Maggie Glover> In Florence, the early 50s, no, we could not sit at the counter.

♪ [soft jazz music] ♪ <Rev Joseph Darby> I don't think I saw a Disney movie until I was almost out of high school because the theater that ran Disney in Columbia was segregated.

We had a couple of very fair skinned classmates who could pass for White and they would go to the Disney movies and come back and tell us about them.

♪ [upbeat jazz music] ♪ <Cecil Williams> The NAACP president here in Orangeburg took me to Charleston to photograph what I thought of that time as this big lawyer coming from New York.

We arrived that evening and took a picture of Thurgood Marshall.

It turned out he was there to really be engaged in that case known as Briggs versus Elliott.

The Briggs versus Elliot case, that was the first case in history to attack segregation in public education.

It's known as Brown versus Board of Education because Governor Burns of South Carolina persuaded the Supreme Court not to name it after a South Carolina case.

<TV announcer> This is the Supreme Court of the United States.

On May 17, this Court ruled unanimously that segregation in public schools was not legal.

<Thurgood Marshall> We do believe that this decision in itself would encourage the people to take further steps without litigation in many areas.

<John Coski> In the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education, the flag became a popular symbol of organizations and individuals who oppose the decision and were determined to maintain segregation.

<Dr.

Bobby Donaldson> Although the courts had already decreed in a Brown v Board, there remained fierce opposition in South Carolina and other states, to the integration of Black and White schools.

When you read some of the literature, the sermons, the letters, people thought this would be the end of the world.

<Interviewee> "They think that if colored people "get into the school, we're going to "date them and end up marrying them."

<Maurice Hobson> The changing of the state flag of Georgia has so much to do with the federal mandates brought on by Brown v. Board of Education, which outlaws de jure segregation, and strikes down Plessy versus Ferguson.

The original state flag of Georgia that was introduced in 1879, was based on the first national flag of the Confederate States of America.

The only difference is the emblem of the arcs in the middle of it.

The new proposal to change the state flag was to implement the actual Confederate Battle Flag, so not the Confederate Flag, the Confederate Battle Flag.

<Michael Green> It was meant to be a symbol like all the Confederate monuments and statues erected at the time too, of who was in charge, and who was not.

<Maurice Hobson> State Senator Jefferson Lee Davis.

Not only are we referencing Jefferson Davis, the first president, we're referencing Robert E. Lee, as well.

One of the things that Senator Davis did was he talked about how Georgia suffered.

And he weaponizes that nearly 100 years later to really evoke emotion amongst the state legislature.

It passes on February 1, 1956, with a 41 to 2 vote.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Steve Murray> When we talk about the appearance of the Confederate Battle Flag at the state capitol, it's important to remember what was happening in Alabama in the early 1960s.

1961 was the Freedom Rides.

And then in 1962, George Wallace is elected governor of Alabama.

<George Wallace> And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow,and segregation forever.

[crowd applause] <Steve Murray> By the spring of 1963, the Birmingham campaign is really ratcheting up.

Martin Luther King has been arrested and penned the letter from Birmingham jail.

And it is clear that there is a building momentum of activity.

<Amb.

Andrew Young> Nothing we ever planned, worked the way we planned it.

But when everything we planned to do failed, then something mysterious and miraculous would happen.

And we would prevail.

<Steve Murray> Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General and brother of the President comes to the South to show the flag, so to speak, of the federal government.

The environment as Kennedy arrives is one that can be described as hostile.

On Thursday, April 25, 1963, the day that Robert Kennedy arrives in Montgomery, the Confederate Battle Flag appears above the dome of the Alabama State Capitol for the first time.

For several years after 1963, two flags flew above the Alabama State Capitol, the state flag and below it was the Confederate Battle Flag.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <Michael Green> I think one of the reasons I love flags and I study flags is because I'm fascinated by how much emotion they can bring out of us.

<Gov.

David Beasley> Symbols mean something.

They mean something.

<Todd Rutherford> We sit in a State House where the entire city of Columbia is that way.

And that is the north side of this building.

And it is the back of the building.

The front of the building faces the south, the Supreme Court is across the street, and it faces the south.

The Federal Courthouse is down the street and it faces the south.

Symbols mean a great deal and flags even more than symbols, because they blow in the wind.

They breathe.

They mean something.

♪ [somber music] ♪ <Michael Green> Because flags are these transient fluid things, they can mean one thing when they're originally designed, but as they get used over time, that meaning can change and shift and even get hijacked.

<Rep.

Cobb-Hunter> The rub is in the meaning and who and what it means.

<Carl Jones> Just as hate groups, misuse the Confederate Flag, they likewise misuse the American Flag.

They misuse the Holy Bible.

<Ben Jones> What we're talking about here is context.

I don't know anybody Black, White, yellow, brown and red, who can't tell the difference between a Confederate Flag being waved by some bigot with the Ku Klux Klan.

And that Confederate Flag that flies all over the world in a benign way on top of the General Lee.

<Dr.

Bobby Donaldson> Along Main Street, in Columbia, there were African Americans walking down the sidewalk with American flags.

And right next to them, are White students with Confederate Flags, a striking juxtaposition.

<Amb.

Andrew Young> You know, the Confederate Flag was irrelevant to us.

We were not interested in the symbols of racism.

It was the substance of racism, and the political and economic discrimination that we focused on.

I get disgusted with everybody that gets hung up on symbols, and forgets the real problems of life.

Which, for me, boiled down to food and jobs, education and health.

And I don't see a Confederate Flag impacting those significantly at all.

♪ [tense music] ♪ <James Clyburn> I can think of few things that are more important than symbols.

For someone to argue that the flag is nothing but a piece of cloth, which I've heard a minister say.

And I asked him, 'What is the Cross?'

The Cross is nothing but a piece of wood.

If you can believe that the Cross, a strong symbolism to Christianity, that flag is a strong symbol to the followers of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

That in and of itself, ought to cause enough pause to the people of South Carolina, not to be romancing that flag.

♪ [tense music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ <Pres.

Obama> ♪ Amazing grace ♪ <Rep.

Horne> I can not believe [voice breaking with emotion] that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful.

<Rep.

Rutherford> Standing out there with my kids watching the flag come down was unbelievable.