South Carolina state Sen. Paul Thurmond, son of Strom, says the Confederate flag must come down

The son of longtime senator and once-staunch segregationist Strom Thurmond evoked his family's history on Tuesday when he declared that it was time for the Confederate battle flag to be removed from the grounds of South Carolina's state capitol.

"I am aware of my heritage," state Sen. Paul Thurmond (R-Charleston) said, referring to his family's background in South Carolina and the Civil War. "I am not proud of this heritage." Calling the practice of slavery "inhumane and wrong, wrong, wrong," Thurmond said it was "time to acknowledge our past, atone for our sins, and work for a better future," the Charleston City Paper reports. "The future cannot be built on symbols of war, hate, and divisiveness." Thurmond said he's "proud to take a stand, and no longer be silent," and thinks the sooner the flag comes down, the better. "We must take down the Confederate flag and we must take it down now," he said. "But if we stop there, we have cheated ourselves out of an opportunity to start a different conversation about healing in our state. I am ready."

Before switching to the Republican Party, the late Strom Thurmond ran for president as a 'Dixiecrat' in 1948, and won a Senate seat in 1954 during a special election. He opposed racial desegregation after the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, and holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history — 24 hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He was a senator until 2003, when he left office at 100.

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