Battle-Flag Battle.

Should the Confederate flag on South Carolina's capitol come down?

YES

In 1961, the Confederate battle flag was raised over the South Carolina capitol for the first time in the modern era. With the national government just beginning to enforce the Supreme Court's school desegregation rulings across the South, politicians in the state wanted to symbolize their intention to resist what they saw as illegitimate federal authority.

Fortunately, the right to equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment won out over the purported right of states to practice segregation. There is no question that the right side prevailed in that struggle of the early 1960s, just as the right side had prevailed 100 years before.

And yet, the Confederate flag is still flying atop the Statehouse in Columbia. Now the NAACP has organized a boycott of tourism in the state, and the state legislature refuses to remove the flag.

Although my African-American forefathers were persecuted under the battle flag of the Confederacy, I take no offense when I see it in the back window of a pickup truck, or sewn on a denim jacket, or draped across a dormitory window.

But as a U.S. citizen, I am disgusted by the spectacle of civil authorities in South Carolina officially and publicly embracing a symbol of illegal rebellion against legitimate national authority.

--GLENN C. LOURY Director, Institute of Race and Social Division Boston University Times Op-Ed page

NO

The Confederate battle flag atop the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, is not an attack upon anyone. It is simply a permanent memorial to the roughly 21,000 South Carolinians who died defending the state during the War Between the States.

Many of us believe that flying the flag is a perfectly appropriate way to remember the service of Confederate soldiers, who served honorably and who deserve to be commemorated. Typically, these soldiers weren't wealthy plantation owners. They were ordinary men who, when their homes and families were threatened with invasion, took their muskets off the wall and went off to fight--and often to die--defending their homes and their principles. These principles weren't all that different from the ones that had inspired their grandfathers to fight against the British for independence less than a century before. And many of these ideas still apply today, when we often find struggles between a strong central government and people who believe things should be decided closer to home at the state or local level.

The NAACP and others who say they want the Confederate flag to come down from the capitol have rejected a number of proposed compromises. We are starting to see that their real goal is to rid public places of all flags, banners, and emblems of the South's effort in the War Between the States. That would be a shame, because it would be erasing an important part of our history, one from which we have much to learn today.

--CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN Editor Southern Partisan magazine Columbia, S.C.