Confederate monuments are coming down. Confederate symbols are coming down.
And Confederate flags are flying off the shelves, according to a new CBS News report.
CBS spoke with Belinda Kennedy, the owner of Alabama Flag & Banner about the uptick in sales.
"What's really pushing sales is removal of the monuments," Kennedy said. "The general feeling I get from customers that call and email is that they are just pushing back at people who are trying to revise our history. I think as long as that's in the news demand will continue."
A lot of U.S. flag makers used to produce the CSA flag, but after Dylan Roof spoke out about how the flag helped to give him the confidence he needed to murder nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, most ceased production.
Mary E. Repke, the senior vice president of sales and marketing at Annin Flagmakers, said to CBS, "Flags are very powerful symbols, and clearly this flag has become a symbol of a negative aspect of our country's past. For some people, it represents something very negative and hateful."
Now Alabama Flag & Banner is the last large manufacturer of the foreign power's flag.
Kennedy says that her company will continue putting out rebel flags and collecting American checks.
A few Chinese flag makers also manufacture the rebel flag, but, ironically, Kennedy says most businesses and consumers like their Confederate States of America flags to be made in the country the CSA was trying to destroy.
She also says that the symbols of the Confederate States of America are not a problem.
"To me, removing monuments and flags is not a solution," Kennedy said. "If the intent is to combat racism, that's clearly not going to do it, because we did all that two years ago shortly after [Roof] shot all those poor innocent people in the church. And I think we have a bigger racial divide than what we did two years ago."
Kennedy told AL.com that since Charlottesville, her company sells in a week the number of Confederate States of America flags it used to sell in a year.
In addition to being a capitalist, Kennedy is a Daughter of the Confederacy and a self-described "history buff" believes that the CSA flag has an important place in today's America.
"When you've got people like the Ku Klux Klan and these neo-Nazi groups, the white supremacists, when they hijack the flag, that should be a crime," Kennedy said, "Because that's not what the flag is about. But that's what makes people so vehemently, adamantly opposed to the flag … When we start trying to rewrite our history, we are forgetting our history."
