Summary and Key Points: South Carolina Judge Forces Confederate Flag Down From 120-Foot Pole
A Spartanburg County fight over a 120-foot Confederate battle flagpole has resurfaced South Carolina’s long-running flag wars.
After the county issued a 2022 zoning violation, a board sided with the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2023, only for a circuit court to reinstate the violation in February 2024.
In a January 29, 2026 order, a judge denied the group’s motion to alter or amend, criticizing incomplete disclosures and citing a lack of “clean hands.”
With a February 5 deadline looming, the flag came down in late January. The clash echoes the 2015 removal of the flag from the statehouse grounds and its mid-20th-century revival.
The South Carolina Confederate Flag Fight, Explained: 2022 Violation To 2026 Order
Culture wars over Confederate flags might have seemed like a product of an earlier era. But there was another skirmish this week, when a court ruled that a Confederate battle flag in South Carolina must come down. It’s part of a complex series of court rulings, going back several years.
According to Fox Carolina, a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp #68 had displayed the flag atop a 120-foot-tall flagpole on its property but had not obtained a proper permit. Spartanburg County, back in 2022, had issued a Notice of Violation which, according to the TV station, “told them to either [lower] the flag to 30 feet and [display] a flag that does not exceed five by eight feet or to remove the flagpole.”
A zoning board sided with the camp in early 2023. The County filed an appeal with a circuit court, which reversed the Zoning Board and reinstated the Notice of Violation in February of 2024. That led to an appeal to the South Carolina Court of Appeals, which remains pending.
That brings us to this week.
Alter or Amend
That leads up to last month, when the camp filed a “Motion to Alter or Amend.”
The result?
“A judge denied that motion on January 29, 2026, rejecting every argument the camp presented in a 10-page order,” the Fox Carolina story said. “The judge’s order focused on what the Camp did not disclose. He criticized the Camp for not disclosing the height to local officials, though they did disclose it to the Federal Aviation Administration, calling this a lack of ‘clean hands.'”
The camp was given a deadline of February 5 to comply, and their attorney told the TV station that the flag was taken down in late January, and “will stay down for now.”
Down at the Capitol
The current battle is taking place more than a decade after the resolution of a different fight over that flag, also in South Carolina.
In July of 2015, the Confederate flag was taken down from the state capitol in Columbia.
“For the first time since the civil rights movement, the Confederate flag was removed entirely from the South Carolina Statehouse, in a swift ceremony Friday before thousands of people who cheered as the Civil War-era banner was lowered from a 30-foot flagpole,” was how CBS News reported it.
There had been calls for several years to remove the flag. In 2000, legislation was passed to move the flag from the top of South Carolina’s statehouse building to a different spot, on a Confederate monument near the building.
The decision, by South Carolina’s then-Gov. Nikki Haley came after the Charleston church mass shooting the previous month, in which an avowed white supremacist gunned down nine African-American church members. Haley had, before then, been supportive of keeping the flag at the Capitol.
Haley remained part of the flag controversies, especially after she emerged as a potential presidential candidate.
In late 2019, four years after the flag came down, Haley drew controversy when she referred to the flag as a symbol of “service, sacrifice and heritage,” that had been “hijacked” by that mass shooter, she said in an interview with Glenn Beck.
“Here is this guy who comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of,” she said on the Beck podcast, per the New York Times. “We don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. There’s always the small minority who are always going to be there, but people saw it as service, sacrifice, and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”
After the controversy, Haley declared in a social media post that “2015 was a painful time for our state. The pain was and is still real. Below was my call for the removal of the Confederate flag & I stand by it. I continue to be proud of the people of SC and how we turned the hate of a killer into the love for each other.”
A Reaction to the Civil Rights Movement
Some have assumed that the modern display of the Confederate flag must go all the way back to the Civil War. But that’s not quite true- the flag had a massive revival in the middle of the 20th century, as a reaction to the rise of the Civil Rights movement.
According to a National Geographic account last August, the stars and bars “was never the official flag of the Confederacy” — there were, in fact, multiple such flags. “But the Confederate flag has since been claimed by white supremacists and mythologized by others as an emblem of a rebellious Southern heritage.”
There was a “flag fad” in 1948, with the emergence of the Dixiecrats and Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign.
“The Dixiecrats’ adoption of the Confederate battle flag as a party symbol led to a surge in the banner’s popularity, and a ‘flag fad’ spread from college campuses to Korean War battlefields and beyond,” the National Geographic account said.
In 1956, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, “Georgia adopted a state flag that prominently incorporated the symbol.”
Then came the 1960s.
“With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Southern states were forced to roll back segregation. Despite those losses, their flag endured—now as part of pop culture,” National Geographic said. “Thanks to savvy merchandising and widespread availability, the battle flag was now a national symbol of rebelliousness and social unrest. Within a few decades, it became a staple for artists seeking to portray anti-establishment cool. It flew onstage with Lynyrd Skynyrd and adorned the Dukes’ car on the wildly popular The Dukes of Hazzard TV show.
This led to legal battles, such as the one currently raging in South Carolina.
About the Author: Stephen Silver
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
