1 year after church shooting, much is the same in Charleston

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — The names of Confederate generals still adorn street signs in Charleston's public housing projects, and a heroic waterfront statue dedicated to the Confederate Defenders of Charleston still faces Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

After the June 17, 2015, massacre, South Carolina lawmakers did what many people thought was impossible to achieve and removed the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds in Columbia.

Across the country, as far away as Alaska, officials moved to strip streets, college dormitories and even lakes of the names of Confederates, secessionists and public figures who championed segregation.

A white man who police said hated blacks and posted photos of himself with the Confederate flag has been charged with killing the nine parishioners.

Bernard Powers, a black College of Charleston history professor, noted that it took a 15-year struggle to get the flag removed from the Statehouse grounds and that it happened only after the slayings.

University of North Carolina history professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage, who is white, said he understands blacks who feel alienated seeing statues in public places honoring those who fought a war in large part to keep them enslaved.

The area commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Civil War earlier this decade with subdued events at Fort Sumter and elsewhere, compared to the celebratory mood surrounding the 100th anniversary.

[...] there was a new emphasis on slavery as a cause of the war and the roles that blacks played in the conflict.

Brundage said he expects skirmishes over Confederate monuments to continue to pop up across the South, but that a full-scale removal of Confederate symbols still seems a long way off, even generations removed from the Civil War.