The Buzz: Outsiders pushed up timing of flag announcement, Haley says

Two days after nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston were gunned down, Gov. Nikki Haley decided the time had come to remove the Confederate flag from the S.C. State House grounds.

The governor wanted to wait until after all the funerals for the shooting victims were over, which would have been another week at least.

But SLED Chief Mark Keel told Haley that chatter on social media was growing about out-of-state protestors, on each side of the flag issue, planning to come to South Carolina. And, just days after the shootings, an anti-flag rally at the State House drew more than 1,000 protestors.

Despite wanting to hold off on addressing the flag issue, out of respect for the families of the slain, Haley said she was out of time.

“I remember being somewhat frustrated with people wanting to talk about South Carolina and wanting to talk about policy of any sort. They were talking about hate crime legislation and gun legislation,” Haley told The State last week. “I was very frustrated with them when I knew this is our state, these are our people. And if there’s a decision that’s going to be made, it’s got to be made from inside out. We can’t have anything from outside in.

“We needed to heal before anybody came in from out of state.”

Haley chose to call for the flag’s removal on Monday, June 22 — five days after the slayings and three days before the first funeral.

‘Kick in the gut’

Haley’s decision to ask lawmakers to banish the Civil War banner, which had flown on the Capitol grounds for 53 years, developed in the first 48 hours after the June 17 killings at Emanuel AME Church.

The flag was not on the governor’s mind when she stayed up with Keel until 4:30 a.m. in the morning after word spread about the slayings.

“The news just kept getting worse and worse,” Haley told The State last week, as she began to cry. “I got to Charleston as fast as I could on Thursday. And it was one kick in the gut after another.”

She learned that parishioners at one of the nation’s oldest African-American churches – ranging in age from 26 to 87, and including state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, D-Jasper – were killed during a Wednesday night Bible study in what authorities have called a hate crime.

The governor was getting information from investigators about the accused shooter, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old from the Columbia area who had a history of making racist remarks and allegedly told a friend he wanted to start a race war.

“The more we found out about him, the worse it got,” she said. “In all honesty, I don’t think the flag was a thought at that time. It was, ‘I’ve got to protect the state. I’ve got to hold them together.’ It was a very sad time, and the people needed to grieve, but I knew they were still in shock and they needed answers.”

Haley said she was hoping for word that Roof, who was captured the morning after the shooting in North Carolina, had a history of mental illness. He didn’t.

“This was pure hate,” she said.

Haley spent the day after the shooting at a Charleston vigil, and, she said, taking care of the victims’ families. “It was making sure we were touching bases with everybody.”

The decision

The Confederate flag came up as a topic as Haley prepared on the night of June 18 to appear on a series of national television news interviews the following morning. She spoke with advisers about how to answer questions about the Confederate flag that were expected from TV anchors.

“You know 15 years ago, the General Assembly at the time, they had a conversation. The Republicans and Democrats and everybody came together on a consensus to bring the Confederate flag down off of the dome, and they put it on the monument out in front,” Haley told “CBS This Morning.” “I think that conversation will come back up again.”

Haley was asked her opinion about removing the flag. She responded that the state needed to focus on healing. “There will be policy discussions, and you will hear me come out and talk about it. But, right now, I’m not doing that to the people of my state.”

Haley returned to the State House later on June 19 and spoke with Pinckney’s widow, Jennifer, and Connecticut Gov. Daniel Malloy, who was in office when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Haley went home and waited to speak her husband, Michael, who had returned from a three-week military exercise.

“Somewhere between Friday morning and Friday night, I know it (the decision to remove the flag) had come in a way, and I had my conversation with him,” Haley said. “And it was pretty much decided Friday night.”

Haley spoke to staff members and advisers over the weekend about setting up meetings with S.C. politicians and others on Monday, hours before her planned announcement at the State House. The governor said any previous talk about banishing the Confederate flag had come with warnings about the divisions caused by the 2000 compromise, which moved the flag from the Capitol dome and placed it next to the Confederate Soldier Monument.

But the brutal nature of the church slayings changed all that, she said.

“I felt like I got angry about it,” she said.

Haley’s anger was punctuated when a racist manifesto, allegedly written by Roof, became public while she was setting up her announcement.

“I couldn’t have been more disgusted than I already was,” Haley said.

Breaking the news

While she planned some meetings to share her plans, there were two groups that did not receive any advance warning, Haley said.

Before her decision on the flag, Haley said she did not speak with S.C. business leaders or national retailers, some of which subsequently banned sales of Confederate flag items. That included Wal-Mart, which announced its ban three hours after Haley’s news conference.

Haley, who has spoken at Wal-Mart corporate events, said she learned about the retail bans as well as fellow governors’ moves to ban Confederate flags on specialty plates from her staff, when they saw announcements on social media.

The governor wanted to break the news first on June 22 to a group of S.C. Republicans, a group of state Democrats and members of the state’s congressional delegation.

“The hardest part was that I knew I was calling people in and if they knew why I was calling, they might not come,” she said. “And I was going to have to convince them to do something that they may not want to do. In those groups, it wasn’t friendlies necessarily. It was people who I thought were necessary to the conversation – whether it was they were in the debate the first time (in 2000 or) whether it was they were vocal now.”

She also met with civic leaders – including Charleston Mayor Joe Riley and the heads of the S.C. NAACP and Columbia Urban League – some of whom helped in the wake of an April incident, in which a North Charleston police officer shot and killed an unarmed African-American man.

“They were very good with us in helping keep the peace when that happened,” she said.

With the meetings in her first-floor office out of the way, Haley walked up a set of back stairs to the second-floor lobby that separates the S.C. House and Senate chambers and announced:

“Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it is time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds.”

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 2:50 PM with the headline "The Buzz: Outsiders pushed up timing of flag announcement, Haley says."