by Our Foreign Desk

SOUTH CAROLINA state senators voted overwhelmingly to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House on Monday following last month’s Charleston church shooting.

The South Carolina Senate voted 37-3 on Monday to take down the flag, placed near the edge of the Statehouse grounds in 2000 as part of a compromise to remove the flag from atop the Statehouse dome.

The move followed protests against the continued presence of the relic of slavery 150 years after the end of the civil war.

Dylann Roof, the young man arrested for the shooting of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in central Charleston, posed with a Confederate battle flag in photos, as well as wearing a jacket emblazoned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia.

Mr Roof was apparently influenced by racist propaganda on the far-right Council of Concerned Citizens website.

His victims included Carolina Senate and former House of Representatives member Clementa Pinckney.
Mr Pinckney’s desk remained draped in black cloth as senators spoke in the debate on the Bill.

The final vote was well in excess of the two-thirds majority to recommend the bill to the lower South Carolina House of Representatives.

“We now have the opportunity, the obligation, to put the exclamation point on an extraordinary narrative of good and evil, of love and mercy that will take its place in the history books,” said Republican Senator Tom Davis.

The lower house will debate the issue today.