Hampton: Honor Emanuel nine by working for education, voting rights and a more perfect union

There is no better or more fitting tribute to the Rev. and Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney and his eight parishioners than to disentangle the education of our children from political fights over race and ideology, to establish a culture of voter participation and to recommit to the highest ideal that our public school children hear described in their history studies: to form a more perfect union among us.

U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1954 decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, whose roots were in South Carolina’s own Briggs v. Elliott, was a step toward improving our union. A decade later, Congress adopted measures to guarantee voting rights for all, intending to end voter intimidation and prevention practices.

Unfortunately, our state and those leaders whose interests were vested in that racist system fought back with their own symbolic and real acts. While the rest of the nation moved forward, South Carolina doubled down on defiance and discrimination.

Chief among their symbolic actions was the placement of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s battle flag on the State House dome in 1961, roughly halfway between the Brown decision of 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act, a full century past the end of the war in which that flag flew, signified to our citizens that race-based hatred, prejudice and institutional discrimination would continue.

Thus, the state’s own constitutional obligation to educate all of its children became inextricably and unfortunately entangled with the state’s political commitment to the long-discredited ideologies of race-based supremacy. For more than a half-century, the victims of that entanglement have been South Carolina’s generations of children who have never seen equitable access to high-quality public education made the highest priority by any two consecutive governors or legislatures.

During the past three weeks, South Carolina has had another opportunity to search its collective soul. Something about the premeditated slaughter of nine worshipers at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston has touched all of us deeply, as it should.

Today, for the first time since the tumultuous debates and compromise of 2000, state leaders are talking seriously about removing the Confederate Army battle flag from our state’s most public space. It will be altogether fitting and proper for our leaders to remove the offending symbol from its prominent place on our public grounds.

Just as the flag’s placement in 1961 coincided with real steps to defy, delay and limit implementation of a system of public education available to all children, so should the symbolic removal of the flag now coincide with our state Supreme Court’s charge to demonstrate a real commitment to public schools sooner rather than later. It should include acting guarantee and promote the sacred right of suffrage to every eligible citizen. It also should include investing in the economic development of rural communities and others that race-based discrimination left behind.

Many of us who knew of the assassinated Senator Pinckney’s commitment to public education, voting rights and rural economic development saw his commitment demonstrated not symbolically but through real acts and advocacy.

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 11:56 PM.