Protests of Confederate Symbols Spread Nationwide

People gathered outside South Carolina's State House in Columbia on Tuesday called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

COLUMBIA, S.C. — As South Carolina legislators voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to consider removing a Confederate battle flag from the Capitol grounds, a groundswell against symbols of the Confederacy spread to other states, fueled by newfound support from conservatives.

Spurred by the killing of nine people inside a Charleston church last week, Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, said Monday that the state’s General Assembly should remove the Confederate flag from outside the State House.

In Mississippi, the Republican speaker of the State House, Philip Gunn, a Republican, said the banner should be removed from his state’s flag. Matt Bevin, the Republican nominee for governor in Kentucky, lauded Ms. Haley and said that a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, should be removed from his state’s Capitol.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat, said he was acting to have the state stop issuing specialty license plates that feature the Confederate battle flag to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and some Maryland Democrats called for the same change in their state. In Tennessee, Democrats and Republicans have said that a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, should be removed from the state Capitol.

Retailers like Walmart and Amazon plan to no longer sell items with the flag on them. Statues of icons of the Old South were vandalized in Austin, Tex., Baltimore, Charleston and other cities. Student leaders and some politicians called for the removal of similar statues from the Austin campus of the University of Texas.

For generations, conservative Southerners defended the symbols of the Confederacy as standing for their history, not slavery and racism, while many conservatives from other regions said it was not their place to take a stand. But this week, Ms. Haley was urged by national Republican leaders, including several presidential contenders, to banish the flag, and the state’s two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, endorsed her decision.

Ms. Haley and Mr. Graham said their views were changed by the massacre last Wednesday of nine people at a Bible study meeting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. One victim, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was the church’s pastor and a state senator who was widely liked by members of both parties.

The man charged in the shooting, Dylann Roof, 21, had posted multiple pictures online of himself with the Confederate banner, and a website registered to him contained a white supremacist manifesto. The nine victims were black; Mr. Roof is white.

Referring to the Confederate flag, Ms. Haley said Monday, “We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer.”

The votes here on Tuesday were procedural, merely allowing legislators to take up a bill on the flag in the coming days, but they signaled broad, bipartisan support for taking it down. It also prompted some Republicans to speak in unusually blunt terms about the history the flag represents.

“Our ancestors were literally fighting to keep human beings as slaves, and to continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will,” said state Senator Paul Thurmond, a Republican, explaining that he would vote to remove the flag. “I am not proud of this heritage.”

His remarks were all the more notable since he is the son of Strom Thurmond, the former governor and United States senator who was a segregationist candidate for president in 1948.

Another Republican senator, Tom Davis, called the flag “a painful reminder of a shameful part of our history.”

Senator after senator invoked the memory of Mr. Pinckney, whose desk was draped in black cloth, a single white rose atop it.

“If they think they’ve silenced his voice, look at what he’s done to this Senate and this state,” said Senator Gerald Malloy, a Democrat who is black. “His voice is right here in this Senate.”

The General Assembly is meeting under a resolution that limits what matters can be addressed, and a two-thirds vote of both houses was needed to add the flag to that agenda.

The motion carried by a unanimous voice vote in the Senate, though one senator, Lee Bright, a Republican, said he would vote against a bill to remove the flag. In the House, the vote to take up the flag issue was 103 to 10.

At a rally here in Columbia outside the State House, a few hundred flag opponents chanted “bring it down,” and urged more people around the state to help them keep up the pressure on lawmakers. “If our ancestors could march, then certainly you can pick up the telephone, use Twitter,” said State Senator Marlon Kimpson.

The Rev. Nelson Rivers III vowed that “we will keep coming back over and over and over” until the flag is gone.

Mr. Davis told the demonstrators that while he was with them, “there are some very good and decent people up there in that General Assembly, without a racist bone in their body, who revere that flag.”

As part of a compromise in 2000, the flag was removed from atop the Capitol dome, and the legislature ordered that any further change required a two-thirds vote in each chamber. But this week, some lawmakers said that it was not within the legislature’s power to set such a threshold — and that it might only take a majority in each house to change the law.