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Activist Bree Newsome Arrested After Daring South Carolina Confederate Flag Removal

FreeBree is now trending nationwide

MELISSA LOCKER

MELISSA LOCKER

In the wake of the murders of nine churchgoers in in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, many in the community and nationally have called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse steps in Columbia.

An activist named Bree Newsome just did it herself.

Newsome scaled the 30-foot flag pole outside the statehouse early this morning, climbing the pole with the help of a harness, which quickly attracted the attention of law enforcement. As the Capitol police ordered her down, she continued her act of civil disobedience and took down the Confederate flag. She paused in her descent to declare, “I come to get you in the name of God. This flag comes down today!”

As she came down from the pole, she uttered prayers and told awaiting police that she was “prepared to be arrested.” Police took the flag out of her hands, helped her over the enclosure, and she was taken away as a gathered crowd applauded her actions and chanted, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Newsome and her spotter, activist James Tyson, were arrested and charged with defacing a monument and booked into jail, WLTX, the Columbia CBS affiliate, reported.

Newsome and Tyson were part of a group of protestors who organized the flag removal, planning to keep the flag in a box while the funerals for the victims of the mass murder were held this week, youth educator and organizer Tamika Lewis told the New York Daily News saying, “We didn‘t see it fit to have the flag stand erect while the people who were massacred were laid to rest under it.”

The hashtag #keepitdown started to trend on social media on Saturday, following Newsome’s D.I.Y. disobedience.

Governor Nikki Haley has called for the flag‘s removal and state senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney was among those killed in the shooting at the historically black Emanuel A.M.E. church. But in South Carolina, it takes a two-thirds majority vote by the legislature to have the Confederate flag lowered, and it was back atop the flagpole shortly after Newsome's arrest.

The hashtag #FreeBree is currently the number one trending term in the United States on Twitter. Among those applauding Newsome’s act was Selma director Ava DuVernay whotweeted that she hopes “to direct the motion picture about a black superhero I admire. Her name is @BreeNewsome.”