Confederate flag supporters describe how their views changed

Thousands of people wrote to South Carolina Gov Nikki Haley after she said the Confederate flag must come down in response to last year's church shootings.
Many were angered by her call, but some said the massacre changed their minds.
The Associated Press reached out to the writers of these emails and letters after the Republican governor's office released 10,000 pages of documents last week in response to requests for public records from last summer's flag debate.
Among them are poignant notes from flag supporters explaining how their thoughts evolved after a white man who celebrated the symbol was charged with gunning down nine black people at a Bible study.

The AP found Justin Hough in North Carolina, where he expanded on his feelings now that reactions to police killings threaten to provoke even more violence.
"It's a tarnished, tattered image of the South," Hough said. Southerners who don't acknowledge that either don't understand the impact, or are "just lying about what it says to other people."

In his letter, Hough said he was a graduate of The Citadel military academy who once loved "the Confederate flag, singing Dixie and defending our right to say the N-word." "I came to understand," he wrote, that "attaching southern pride to these relics of the past only served to solidify that the true beliefs of the south are the stereotypes of hatred, bigotry and racism."

Describing himself as a white descendant of Confederate veterans, Hough told the AP that when he was growing up in rural Georgia, everyone used racial epithets and thought nothing of it. The Confederate flag was seen as part of their regional heritage, not a symbol of hate.
"It wasn't the rebel flag," he said. "It was southern culture."
He said the hazing of a black Citadel cadet in the late 1980s made him realize that the symbol he respected could be harmful to others, and the church shootings made him even more convinced that it was time to let it go.

Many letter writers castigated Haley for trying to erase the memory of Confederate soldiers. Many others praised her decision as courageous.