Newsome spent about seven hours in jail the Confederate flag was restored before she had even been released. Ten days later, after meeting with other activists-including one who had scaled trees for Greenpeace-and practicing on a few lampposts, she climbed the thirty-foot pole outside the State House, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-seventh Psalm as she rose higher and higher, removed the flag, and returned it to the ground, where a crowd applauded and the police arrested her. Then, on June 17, 2015, a white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners during a Bible study at a church in Charleston, and Newsome decided it was time for the flag to come down. Her ancestors had been enslaved in South Carolina, and she had heard stories from her grandmother about the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan in Greenville. Newsome had been thinking about that Confederate flag for some time. Police officers were hollering up at her, demanding that she come down, but she kept climbing, and kept preaching: “You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence.
Bree Newsome, a thirty-year-old artist from North Carolina, was a few dozen feet above the ground, scaling a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House. “In the name of Jesus, this flag has to come down.” So begins one of the most consequential sermons of the twenty-first century.
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