Spurrier Wants Confederate Flag Taken Down
The Confederate flag shouldn’t fly at the Statehouse, South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier said Saturday after the Gamecocks’ annual spring game.
Spurrier’s comments came in response to questions about something he said Friday night when he received an award from a volunteer organization. According to people at that event, Spurrier said the flag should come down.
“My opinion is we don’t need the Confederate flag at our Capitol,” Spurrier said. “I don’t really know anybody that wants it there, but I guess there are a lot of South Carolinians that do want it there.”
City Year board chairman Kerry Abel said Spurrier’s remarks at his group’s awards banquet Friday night caught everyone by surprise.
Spurrier’s predecessor, Lou Holtz, joined Clemson’s football coach Tommy Bowden and both schools’ basketball coaches in calling for the flag to be removed from the Capitol dome in 2000, when the NAACP started a boycott of the state.
The flag was removed from the dome in 2000, but placed at the Confederate Soldier Monument on Statehouse grounds. The state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said that was not good enough and continued its boycott. The initial boycott drew wide support from inside and outside the state, but encouragement for the ongoing effort has waned in recent years.
The NCAA has prohibited the state from holding predetermined championships such as the basketball regionals since 2001 because of the Confederate flag.
Spurrier said Saturday that no one had asked him his opinion of the flag in the two seasons he has coached at South Carolina.
Steve Spurrier, South Carolina, Confederate Flag
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