Protest March Against Confederate Flag in S.Carolina Monday April 3 1:28 AM ET By Harriet McLeod CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - About 600 people wearing suits or T-shirts plastered with ``Take it Down'' bumper stickers set off Sunday on a 120-mile protest march to the state capitol in Columbia to urge legislators to remove a Confederate flag, which they say is a racist symbol, from atop the Statehouse. ``What adorns the top of a state capitol could only be and should only be the banners and flags that represent every citizen of that state,'' said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. organizer of the five-day ``Get in Step'' protest march scheduled to end Friday. State Sen. McKinley Washington called the march ``a pilgrimage to the state capitol of South Carolina, just as the children of Israel walked to the sea.'' Speak your mind Discuss this story with other people. [Start a Conversation] (Requires Yahoo! Messenger) The black and white crowd included local politicians as well as S.C. Congressman James Clyburn, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, author Edward Ball, whose history of his plantation-owning ancestors, ``Slaves in the Family,'' won a National Book Award, and S.C. NAACP president the Rev. James Gallman. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People this year called for a tourism boycott of South Carolina to protest against the red and blue cross-barred flag, a banner of Southern heritage, flying over the Statehouse. The legislature raised the flag in 1962 to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War, whose first shots were fired here. Flag protesters say it was flown to protest civil rights. Polls show most South Carolinians want the flag moved from the top of the Statehouse. The NAACP boycott is expected to extend to sports and entertainment, even recruiting of athletes to state schools. But the tourism sanctions, which have cost the state millions of dollars in lost conventions and hotel bookings are ``working well enough,'' Gallman said. ``Some understand dollars more than they understand anything else,'' he said ``We're not going to give our money and be treated as second-class citizens.' ``Why shouldn't we (march)?'' asked retired teacher and newspaperman Clyde Johnson. ``To me, that flag on top of that house is the equivalent of the Republican swastika.'' ``It's long overdue,'' said longshoreman Charles Goss, who marched with a dozen union members under the banner of the International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422. ``That flag was ripped away from my great-grandfather's hands in this century and used by hate groups, who started waving it,'' Riley said. ``They waved it to protest integration.'' ``Next year, the boycott is gonna lose a lot of its sting. If we don't take it down this year, it'll be there for another 1,000 years.'' State Sen. Robert Ford of Charleston said. Legislators who voted to put the flag up almost 40 years ago now say they want it down. But compromise, figuring out where to put the flag when it does come off the pole, has been hard to reach. - Copyright © 2000 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------