COLUMBIA – At least five people were arrested on Saturday as white-supremacist and African-American groups clashed outside the South Carolina State House, where the Confederate battle flag was removed last week after a half-century, authorities said.
Beginning at noon, a Florida-based group called Black Educators for Justice demonstrated on the north side of the capitol. Tensions rose quickly when a column of about 50 white supremacists, many carrying Confederate flags and one a Nazi flag, marched toward the south steps of the capitol at 3:15 p.m.
Lines of state police separated them from a large crowd that jeered and booed. When the group reached the State House lawn, a scuffle broke out, and police moved in quickly to keep the fight from spreading.
While no further violence broke out, the atmosphere, on a day when temperatures neared 100 degrees, remained tense. Several times, police had to separate people shouting obscenities at one another.
Ambulances took seven people to hospitals, the South Carolina Department of Public Safety said in a statement that provided no information on the severity of the injuries. No police officers were hurt, it said.
Racial and cultural tensions have peaked in South Carolina since the shootings last month of nine African-Americans in a historic Charleston church. Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white man charged in the killings, appeared to have been heavily influenced by such symbols as the Confederate battle flag. (Reuters)
