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The stories we tell about the past can have a profound effect on the present. Our choices about how to remember the past and how we use historical symbols can divide communities and also draw them together. In this way, our relationship to the past has the power to transform our present and our future.
In 2015, the decades-long debate over a symbol from the American past intensified. On June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed nine African American worshippers in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The gunman said that he hoped the shooting would ignite a race war in the United States. Investigators later found that the shooter had detailed his racist beliefs on the Internet and posted photos of himself with the Confederate flag.
These photos ignited debate across the United States about the meaning and power of historical symbols. In the United States, the Confederate battle flag from the Civil War has long been a divisive symbol of the country’s history. Most historians maintain that the central issue of the Civil War, which was fought in the 1860s, was slavery; the Confederate states separated from the rest of the country because their leaders believed that the federal government would soon abolish slavery throughout the nation. Yet many Americans today continue to feel an affinity for the battle flag of the Confederate army, the forces that fought to defend the practice of slavery.
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