NAACP: Will look at ending S.C. boycott over flag

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Economic benefits could follow the lowering of the Confederate battle flag Friday.

The flag was removed at 10 a.m. from its location atop a pole at the Confederate Soldier's monument on the front lawn of the Statehouse.

The national president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Cornell William Brooks, said Thursday that his organization now will consider an emergency resolution to lift its boycott of the state.

"Today, South Carolina ushers the state and our country into a new era, one of unity and inclusion at a time of such profound tragedy." he said in a statement. The organization is poised to consider the resolution at its convention Saturday in Philadelphia.

The NAACP imposed an economic boycott on South Carolina in 2000 when legislators voted to keep the Confederate flag on the Statehouse grounds as a compromise to removing it from atop the Capitol dome.

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Confederate symbols, including the battle flag, have been the subject of resentment for years. The battle flag in one version or another has flown at the Statehouse for more than 50 years, going up in 1961 to recognize the 100th anniversary of the Civil War and staying up the following year as a protest of the civil rights movement.

The anger boiled over after the shootings last month at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. The white suspect, Dylann Roof, posed in photos with the Confederate flag.

The civil rights group ColorOfChange.org said the effort to remove Confederate monuments isn't about revising history.

"The truth about the Confederate battle flag is that it represents a past full of racial terrorism and violence against black people," said Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.org. "The South Carolina Legislature took a much needed, and long overdue, step toward facing the racist actions that continue to plague our communities."

North Carolina members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, previously planned a rally here July 18.

Many state lawmakers invoked business interests as a reason to quickly remove the Confederate flag as the nation watched how South Carolina handled the issue.

As the debate in the Statehouse raged late Wednesday, "Who in their right mind would want to come to a state with us in charge?" asked Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat from Orangeburg, S.C.

The state's business community has been united since 1999 that the flag needed to come down, said Ted Pitts, president and chief executive of the South Carolina Chamber.

"We firmly believe that this decision is in the best interests of South Carolina's people and its businesses," officials at plastics manufacturer Sonoco, which has 16 locations in the state, said in a statement. "This transition marks a significant step in the state's continuous progress to model the tolerance, respect and unity that its citizens have shown in Charleston over the past few weeks and value as a central part of our state's culture moving forward."

Contributing: Tim Smith, The Greenville (S.C.) News