With King in Mind, 46,000 Protest Confederate Flag in S.C.

Decrying the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery and racism, about 46,000 people marched to South Carolina’s Statehouse on Martin Luther King Day to demand that the banner be taken down.

They also said the slain civil rights leader should be honored with a permanent state holiday. South Carolina state workers now can take off the King holiday or another of their choice, including several tied to Confederate anniversaries.

“The flag is coming down today,” marchers sang as they walked six blocks from a downtown church to the Statehouse. Some carried signs reading “Your heritage is my slavery.”

Kweisi Mfume, leader of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, told demonstrators at the Statehouse steps: “We will continue to march and we will continue to boycott until it flies no more. We will not be moved, we are not afraid and you can’t turn us around.”

Across the country, Americans remembered the slain civil rights leader Monday with marches and speeches urging the nation to commit itself to King’s principles and fulfill his dream of racial harmony and equality.

This was the first time that the King holiday was observed in some form in all 50 states and the 15th year it has been celebrated as a national holiday.

In Atlanta, Vice President Al Gore joined King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and other King family members in placing two wreaths at King’s grave. King, who was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968, would have been 71 Saturday.

President Clinton helped paint a community computer center in Washington. “Every time you give a little, you always get more back,” Clinton said. “Let’s remember that as Dr. King’s enduring legacy.”

Saying he hoped people would begin to view the day as “a day on, not a day off,” the president put a dark stain on wooden shelves in a third-floor computer lab with a group of young volunteers at the Washington Boys and Girls Club, which serves low-income children.

“It’s a source of immense pride and joy to me every time I see people reaching across the lines that divide them to do things that lift us all up,” Clinton said. “This holiday embodies that. All these children embody that.”

Among the celebrations elsewhere:

* Operation Hope, a community group in New Orleans, honored King by offering to buy used guns for $50 each, no questions asked. The group said the weapons would be turned over to police to be destroyed.

* Several hundred people of many different races marched in Rochester, Minn., where the Rev. Jesse Jackson was the featured speaker. Seven-year-old Naava Johnson came to the march with her grandmother. If King had never been born, the little girl said, “We’d still be slaves.”

* Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber was cast as President Kennedy in a play about King’s life at Willamette University in Salem, Ore. Frank Thompson, assistant director of the Corrections Department, got the role of King.

* Several hundred people marched through downtown Memphis to Claiborne Temple, where King held strategy meetings while leading a sanitation workers’ strike in his final days.

* In Arizona, which in 1992 became the only state to establish the holiday by popular vote, 5,000 people gathered in a park after a march through downtown Phoenix.

Not everyone used the occasion to celebrate King. In Oneonta, Ala., a group blocked from flying the Confederate flag at the courthouse brought its own pole and did it anyway, to honor Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s birthday, which is Wednesday.

“Everybody wants to talk about Martin Luther King, and we’re tired of it. We want them to talk about our hero,” said Benjamin Hestley, commander of the 38-member St. Clair Camp 308 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

At the South Carolina rally against the flag, state police estimated the crowd at 46,000 people.

A few white marchers joined the mostly black crowd.

Margaret Abbott, 59, wore her grandmother’s Daughters of Confederate Veterans certificate around her neck. She said her ancestors fought in the Civil and Revolutionary wars so she could have freedom of choice, and she wants the flag removed.

“We have a lot more important things to do than fight over this stupid flag,” she said.

The NAACP is waging a tourism boycott against South Carolina over the flag. Many marchers from out of state honored the boycott by sleeping Sunday night on cots in church basements instead of checking into hotels.

Only South Carolina’s Legislature can lower the flag.

Although South Carolina is the only state flying the flag from its Capitol, Georgia incorporated the symbol into its state flag in 1956.

Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition now wants tourists to boycott Georgia until the emblem is removed. Activists are threatening to begin the boycott on Jan. 30, the day the Super Bowl will be held in Atlanta.