In Nashville, Nikki Haley reflects on removing Confederate flag from Capitol while SC governor – Tennessean
Sitting on stage with former Gov. Bill Haslam Monday night, the country’s most recent United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley held the attention of a Nashville audience with stories from the inside.
She talked about trying to advise President Donald Trump against calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” at the UN General Assembly in 2017.
She told the audience about the calls she got from former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asking her to be Trump’s secretary of state — an offer she refused — soon after offering her the UN ambassadorship.
Haley, who was in Nashville as part of a publicity tour for her new book, “With All Due Respect,” recounted regular phone calls with Trump and weekly meetings in the Oval Office amid trips to all corners of the world as part of her national Cabinet-level position.
While Haley at times has been critical of Trump and did not endorse him in 2016 when she was governor, the former ambassador has recently been a defender of the president, a position she maintained Monday night.
But the former Republican South Carolina governor, who took office in 2011 at the same as Haslam, also focused on an issue largely limited to governing in the South: Her decision to call for and lobby the state legislature to remove a Confederate symbol from Capitol grounds.
Haley was four-and-a-half years into her term as governor, a position she held until January 2017, when nine African American parishioners were murdered in a Charleston church during a Bible study.
Soon after, the shooter’s website manifesto was uncovered, which included photos of white supremacist symbols and of him posing with the Confederate battle flag — a flag that flew over the South Carolina Capitol.
Describing the days after the mass shooting as the hardest of her life, Haley recounted how she fought with some in the legislature for the removal of the flag. All the while, s he was meeting frequently with civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in an effort to keep them at bay until she could finalize the removal.
Haley recalled how the state Senate easily voted to take down the flag. One of its own, Sen. Clementa Pinckney, was among the nine killed at the church. Haley had tried calling Pinckney to offer support in the moments after news of the shooting broke, unaware that he had been gunned down inside, she said.
But the House wasn’t budging easily.
After a few offers from the speaker, including taking down the Confederate flag but leaving the flagpole it had flown on, Haley made her argument personal.
“I had been the legislature,” Haley said. “I knew what that meant, which meant they were just going to try to put the flag back up again.”
She met with the House Republican Caucus and told a story about how, as the daughter of Indian Sikh immigrants, she went to a fruit stand with her father while growing up in Bamberg, South Carolina, where the pair was racially profiled by the owners.
“Every time I pass that fruit stand, I feel pain,” Haley said. “And I don’t want anybody passing by the statehouse and seeing that flag. I don’t want a child to feel that pain.”
The House subsequently voted to remove the flag and the “people of South Carolina showed true strength and grace and what that looks like during tragedy,” Haley said.
While governor, after the Charleston shooting, Haslam called for the removal of a bust of Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest on display in the Tennessee State Capitol.
Haslam was unsuccessful, however, in convincing the state’s Capitol Commission or legislature to take action to remove the Confederate bust, which some Republicans argued would be erasing history.
Gov. Bill Lee has previously been opposed to moving the bust to the state museum, but months into office announced he would support adding context next to the Forrest bust.
In September, Lee appointed two African American members to the Capitol Commission and said he would call for the group to convene, which has not taken place since Haslam arranged a commission meeting in 2017. The meeting date has not yet been set.
The Monday event with Haley was organized by Parnassus Books and hosted at Woodmont Christian Church.
Despite being asked by Haslam, Haley declined to offer specifics on her next steps.
Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.
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Published 11:02 PM EST Nov 18, 2019
