Days of torrential rains kept much of South Carolina and its capital gripped by floodwaters early Monday as emergency responders promised renewed door-to-door searches for anyone still trapped after a weekend deluge and hundreds of rescues.
For the first time since the civil rights movement, the Confederate flag was removed entirely from the South Carolina Statehouse, in a swift ceremony Friday before thousands of people who cheered as the Civil War-era banner was lowered from a 30-foot flagpole.
A crowd of hundreds gathered Friday among security officers and news crews to witness the historic removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds a day many in the state thought would never come.
The South Carolina House approved a bill removing the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds, a stunning reversal in a state that was the first to leave the Union in 1860 and raised the flag again at its Statehouse more than 50 years ago to protest the civil rights movement.
The Confederate flag that flies at the South Carolina Capitol could soon be making its last stand. The South Carolina House will begin debating the flag's fate Wednesday. If House members back a Senate bill to take the flag down, Gov. Nikki Haley could sign it into law before the end of the week and the flag would be removed and taken to the Confederate Relic Room.
The push to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse is about to clear its first hurdle. But even if a bill to bring down the rebel banner passes the state Senate as expected Tuesday, it faces a less certain future in the House.
While it appears there is broad support in the South Carolina Legislature to bring down the Confederate flag, the depth of that support will get its first test this week as lawmakers return to Columbia to come up with a specific plan.
President Barack Obama used his eulogy for a slain pastor to deliver an unvarnished lecture on America's racial history Friday, and then boldly sang "Amazing Grace," a spiritual meant to summon hope in the darkest of times.
The Confederate battle flag was still flying high atop a 30-foot pole outside the South Carolina Statehouse on Wednesday as lawmakers prepared to honor their beloved black colleague with a viewing in the Rotunda.
A former friend who had reconnected with the man accused of a shooting massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, said Dylann Storm Roof had become an avowed racist, complaining that "blacks were taking over the world" and that "someone needed to do something about it for the white race."
In one blow, the gunman added nine victims at The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to the ever-lengthening list of America's racial casualties and ripped out part of South Carolina's civic heart.
Video released Thursday from the dashboard of white North Charleston police Officer Michael Thomas Slager's cruiser captures the very first moments he and black motorist Walter Scott meet, a strikingly benign encounter at its earliest stages.
