NAACP Poses Wider Boycott of S. Carolina
The NAACP, fighting a compromise to move the Confederate battle flag from atop South Carolina’s Statehouse to a nearby monument, threatened on Tuesday to step up an economic boycott of the state if its Senate did not reject the plan.
After days of failed talks with leading lawmakers, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume told reporters that the nation’s largest civil rights group would ask organized labor and the movie and entertainment industries to support its 4 1/2-month-old tourism boycott of South Carolina if the flag was not completely removed from a “position of sovereignty.”
The current proposal, to fly the flag at a Civil War monument in front of the Statehouse, was approved by South Carolina’s House of Representatives last week.
The vote sent the flag bill back to the Senate, where lawmakers could still consider an amendment to make the flag less prominent by encircling it with military flags and monuments commemorating America’s other major wars.
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