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Survey shows enough votes to remove Confederate flag in S.C. (w/video)

 
Thompson
Thompson
Published June 30, 2015

CHARLESTON, S.C. — What finally opened Paul Thurmond's eyes and changed his heart was in the Book of Mark — the very New Testament passage that his state Senate colleague Clementa Pinckney and eight other members of Emanuel AME Church here were studying the night they were gunned down in an apparent racist hate crime.

It was the parable of the sower, in which Jesus explains how, if a seed falls on fertile ground, it can yield 30, or 60 or a hundredfold.

"I thought it spoke to my public service," Thurmond, 39, said Monday. "I kept thinking about the circumstances. I kept praying about what had happened, and there was this really true belief that good could come out of this horrible tragedy."

The next morning, that verse fresh in his mind, the Republican legislator wrote the speech he would deliver the following day in the Senate, calling for the Confederate battle flag to be pulled from the state Capitol grounds.

Though he didn't mention his father, former South Carolina governor and U.S. senator Strom Thurmond, in the speech, it was lost on no one he was signaling a generational shift.

In the past three-quarters of a century, no name in South Carolina — and, arguably, the nation — has been more closely associated with the politics of race and segregation.

"Strom Thurmond's legacy lingers even in this century," said Matt Moore, chairman of the state Republican Party. "But ironically enough, the page has been turned by his son."

The legislature is expected to vote shortly after July 4, and it appears there will be the necessary two-thirds vote to remove the flag.