Stand-alone Confederate flags pulled from Gettysburg Visitor Center store

The bookstore inside Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center pulled from its shelves Confederate flags and items featuring only the flag Thursday, a retreat from a strong statement the day before that it would continue to sell the flag.

The park will continue to display Confederate flags in its museum and on a few of the about 1,300 monuments dotting the battlefield, said Katie Lawhon, a park spokeswoman.

“Many of our visitors know that there is a national conversation going on about the Confederate flag,” Lawhon said. “It's just not what happened here 152 years ago, but what all it still means today, and part of that is the changing meaning of the Confederate flag.”

Outrage over the slayings of nine black people in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., last week and photos of the white suspect holding a Confederate flag prompted major retailers to stop selling the flag and lawmakers to call for its removal from southern statehouses.

The shop removed 11 of the 2,600 items on store shelves. It will continue to sell items that feature the U.S. and Confederate flags, Lawhon said.

Rodney Cromeans, a historian who lives in Gettysburg, dresses as a Confederate soldier and flies a Confederate flag from his Baltimore Street home to honor his ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, said the park was wrong to stop selling the flag.

“It will alienate a huge portion of the people that come to Gettysburg,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of people today have an ancestor that fought and maybe died on this ground. They come here to make a connection to that ancestor. The people pushing this political correctness have no right to take that away from them.”

The Gettysburg Foundation, a nonprofit that manages the book store, and Lawhon said Wednesday that the shop would not change its policy on selling the Confederate flag or items featuring the flag.

Later that day, National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis asked parks to voluntarily pull Confederate flag items from shop shelves.

“All sales items in parks are evaluated based on educational value and their connection to the park. Any stand-alone depictions of Confederate flags have no place in park stores,” Jarvis said in a statement Thursday.

Lawhon said when the book store decided to continue to sell Confederate flag items, park officials had not received a formal request from Jarvis. Once the shop received the formal request, it decided to comply, Lawhon said.

Aaron Aupperlee is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7986 or aaupperlee@tribweb.com.