A Confederate flag flies next to the Alabama Confederate Memorial on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol building in Montgomery, Ala., Monday, June 22, 2015.

The long, sinister arm of racism found its way into a South Carolina church last week and slaughtered nine innocent people because the shooter’s young mind was polluted with hatred.

As the American people begin to take a closer look at the vile poison of racism, South Carolina lawmakers are beginning to take steps that would remove the Confederate flag and other symbols from state grounds.

Racism in the Deep South, which evolved into widespread violence after the Civil War during Reconstruction and well through the Civil Rights Movement, has long held this region of the country back from achieving its social and economic potential. While many gains were made with the Civil Rights Movement, the South and the nation are seeing a resurgence in hate groups and crimes aimed at African-Americans and others of non-Caucasian backgrounds.

The nation’s prisons are producing an army of racists who combine old Ku Klux Klan talking points with Aryan Nation’s Nazi hate speech. The groups have adopted Confederate and Nazi flags to wave their views. The infectious nature of this upchuck influences many young, impressionable minds. The danger of this hatred showed itself in gruesome form during a Bible study at the South Carolina church.

The debate over Confederate flags hoisted over state capitols or displayed on state-owned property has raged for years. Former Alabama Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. of Cullman agreed with longtime state lawmaker Alvin Holmes and had the Confederate flag removed from the Capitol following a renovation in April 1993.

“It was just time to put it behind us,” Folsom, a Democrat, told the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday. “The controversy was overshadowing a lot of good things we were doing in economic development. It wasn’t a politic thing to do, because a lot of people were very emotional about it, and they voiced that to me.” Folsom added that if the Confederate flag had remained atop the capitol, Alabama would have likely been bypassed by Mercedes-Benz when it decided to locate a plant in Vance, near Tuscaloosa.

In 1994, Folsom had the flags moved over the Confederate Memorial. Bob Bradley, the key curator of the Alabama Department of Archives and History told the Montgomery newspaper the flags at the memorial were meant as an educational exhibit.

Holmes now wants all Confederate flags and symbols removed from state grounds, and he is right to begin this battle again.

The Confederacy is long dead. While the rise of this rogue nation in the South was a pivotal moment in the nation’s long dispute over slavery and a strong central government versus states rights, the bloodshed of the Civil War was the deciding factor.

Inequality was defeated and signed away to history at Appomattox in 1865.

Many of the racists waving their flags and embracing the evil of Hitler’s Aryan dream have little knowledge of the history they believe justifies their hatred.

The United States is a large, diverse family of people from many origins. The Confederate flags belong at appropriate museums that depict the struggle of the Civil War. The truth is that the flag’s resurgence in society was deliberately fueled by racists during the Civil Rights Movement.

South Carolina, Alabama and other states need to remove the old symbols of the Confederacy, because those artifacts are nothing more than symbols of a time when the nation’s existence was threatened. There is not a Confederate States of America. There is a United States of America.

Lower your Confederate flags and pack them away. The South will never rise again as long as it struggles under the yoke of hatred and a broken past.