Activist Pulls Down Confederate Flag in Front of South Carolina Statehouse [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Activist pulls down Confederate flag in front of South Carolina statehouse
Police arrest unidentified woman after she climbed up the 30ft steel flagpole and removed the flag before returning to the ground
Alan Yuhas in New York
@alanyuhas
Saturday 27 June 2015 08.17 EDT Last modified on Saturday 27 June 2015 09.55 EDT
An activist in South Carolina climbed a flagpole in Columbia early on Saturday morning and removed the Confederate flag flying in front of the capitol building. The woman’s action came a day after President Barack Obama gave the eulogy for a black pastor who was murdered by an apparent white supremacist along with eight other people in a Charleston church last week.
A woman identified by a protest organizer as Bree Newsome, a 30-year-old youth organizer from Charlotte, North Carolina, climbed the flagpole before 6am and took down the controversial emblem of the antebellum, slaveholding south, with the assistance of another activist. Newsome was halfway up the 30ft pole when police demanded that she climb back down, but she continued upward and removed the flag.
Activist Mervyn Marcano told the Guardian that when Newsome returned to the ground she and James Ian Dyson were arrested by capitol police and taken to a detention center.
Police did not immediately respond to inquires about whether Newsome and Dyson had been charged, but CNN reported that the pair faced charges of defacing a monument.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/27/woman-removes-confederate-flag-south-carolina-statehouse
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