Lowering of Confederate flag prompts Delaware debate

James Fisher
The News Journal
9:44 p.m. EDT July 9, 2015

South Carolina's vote Thursday to purge its Statehouse grounds of the Confederate battle flag prompted another round of introspection among Delawareans about the propriety of displaying the same flag in this state, which was ambivalent about slavery and the cause of Southern secession during the Civil War.

There are no places in the First State where Confederate flags fly on government property, as was the case in South Carolina, Alabama and other Southern states.

But it is not rare to see the flag on bumper stickers or T-shirts in Delaware, especially in Sussex and Kent counties. And at Georgetown's Marvel Carriage Museum, where a monument to Confederate soldiers and sympathizers from Delaware flies a large Confederate flag, the gift shop sells trinkets with the flag on them, next to paperweights honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – along with weights bearing the faces of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, Lee's enemies in the Civil War ...

Jane Hovington, a leader of the Lower Sussex NAACP, said last month she had come to believe the Georgetown monument to the Confederacy was "not representative of hatred," although she said seeing the flag in other context disturbed her ...

http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2015/07/09/lowering-confederate-flag-prompts-delaware-debate/29938803/