Local SC election candidate apologizes for past support of Confederate flag. He’s Black

Many people regret the things they do in college. Not all of them get national media attention.

That attention has rebounded onto a candidate in a local election more than a decade later. Today, Byron Thomas is a Cayce resident, outreach director for U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-Springdale, and a candidate in the November election for a seat on Cayce City Council.

But to many people trying to research the candidate online, one of the top search results will likely be a news story about Thomas’ fight to keep a Confederate flag in his dorm room at the University of South Carolina’s Beaufort campus back in 2011.

The story garnered attention from many media outlets in and beyond the Palmetto State, fueled partly by the fact Thomas is Black.

At the time, 19-year-old Thomas said he had become interested in the flag during a research project and had come to associate it with his pride in his Southern roots. He argued he had a First Amendment right to display the flag after the university asked him to take it out of his dorm room window when school officials received complaints. In media interviews, he made the case that a Black man flying the Confederate flag could even help to soothe racial tensions.

Today, an older Thomas is at pains to stress that his views on the flag have changed. At a candidate forum last week and again in an interview with The State, he apologized for his past views.

“I just wanted to have the opportunity to sincerely apologize to anyone I brought trauma and hurt to, especially people who look like me, that paved the way for me to be here today,” Thomas said. Now, “the only flag I need to be flying is the American flag.”

In a way, Thomas has walked a similar path to that other South Carolinians have on the issue. In 2015, he wrote a column for The Washington Post saying that while he still hung the Confederate flag in his home, he thought it was time to remove the emblem from the grounds of the S.C. State House in the aftermath of a shooting in a historically Black Charleston church that left nine worshipers dead. The battle flag was moved to the front of the State House in 2000 in a compromise that took it down from the State House dome, where it had flown for almost 40 years.

While a college-age Thomas said his three white roommates at the time had no qualms about his Confederate flag, he told reporters at the time that he ultimately took the flag down because it embarrassed his parents. Thomas told The State his now-wife also had some tough questions for him about the flag while they were dating.

He said he probably would have taken his dorm flag down sooner if he hadn’t felt the school administration was trying to “bully” him when he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. Looking back now, he wishes he had.

“The housing person came with an attitude,” he said. “They could have called me into the office and said students had complained about the window, and had a nice, mature conversation. I felt like I’d been backed into a corner.”

Thomas said for a long time he associated the flag with an ancestor, Benjamin Thomas, who served as a cook in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, until further research into his family history showed that the two were not actually related.

While Thomas said he wants “to be a man about the issue. I’m not going to run away, I’m going to apologize,” his election opponents, both of whom are also Black, aren’t so sure.

“He hasn’t changed his mind. He just wants to get elected,” said James “Skip” Jenkins, the incumbent in Cayce City Council District 2. “I just hate that the younger generation that’s coming up don’t really understand what that (flag) meant, how many people died because of that flag. It’s not going to take a simple apology. That’s not going to work for me.”

Marie Brown, the other candidate for the District 2 seat, said she was unaware of Thomas’s history with the flag until a constituent brought it up at the candidate forum, but she agreed that Thomas had the right to display the flag if he wanted to.

“Do I uplift it as a part of my history and identity? I don’t, but it is a part of history,” Brown said.

But Thomas said he knows it may take some time for people’s impressions of him to change.

“I really do hope people feel my sincerity, moving forward, to try to be on the right side of history,” Thomas said. “I want to live my life to bring people together, and I don’t want my name to be known forever as somebody who’s trying to divide people. I want to bring people together as Jesus taught ... (but) it’s going to take time for people to truly see my apology, so it takes hard work.”