On July 10, the Confederate flag was removed from South Carolina’s State House grounds in Columbia as thousands cheered in victory.

The controversy over the purpose and meaning of the flag re-ignited after a tragic mass shooting at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17. Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old racist gunman, murdered nine people following Bible study that night, screaming racial slurs.

Images of Roof embracing the Confederate flag quickly surfaced, enraging activists, who demanded the bars and stars come down.

Not even a month later, the removal of the confederate flag was shown all over network television, sparking rage in Confederate flag supporters and joy in activists.

Watching the ceremony, city historian Henry Brown remembered a little faded, worn book he had received years before from a “lady of the deep South,” Grandmother Newell.

Grandmother Newell sent Brown Flags of the Confederate States of America 1861-65, a short educational book she had helped to write and publish, in a letter during August of 1948, when Brown was just a teenager. The inscription reads, “To my Yankee boyfriend, from an old rebel Virginian woman.”

Mrs. William Benjamin Newell was born between 1858 and 1859 in Richmond, Virginia and was still a young girl when the Civil War began in April 1861, but she retained her memories from then. At only five years old when the Union troops entered into Richmond on April 3, 1865, Grandmother Newell remembered seeking safety in a root cellar with her mother and siblings until silence had befallen the city three days later. When the family emerged from the cellar, Richmond had been captured.

Mrs. Newell would go on to become president as well as chair of the educational committee for the Richmond Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Through this she would publish Flags of the Confederate States of America, with two goals: to preserve the memory of the “true flags” to pass down to future generations and establish an endowment fund for a William and Mary College Scholarship, to go to a descendant of a confederate soldier.

After the passing of her husband in 1946, Grandmother Newell was “forced” to move north to Cambridge, Massachusetts with her daughter. The daughter, Margaret, was married to Brown’s father’s cousin.

Grandmother Newell (Brown never knew her first name) would tell stories that at a young age entertained Brown despite her “southern, high pitched, drawl, that sounded much like a whine.”

Grandmother Newell, “a proud lady of the deep, was hard put to live in Yankee Country,” and would often complain about the north during her visits to Rhode Island and the Brown family.

Brown recalled one story of Grandmother Newell at lunchtime pushing away and covering freshly pulled carrots from the garden with greens.

When asked what the matter was, she responded, “Why my dear, we in the south feed carrots to the mules.”

Not long after that lunch, Grandmother Newell mailed the book to Brown thanking him for the, “kindness shown a poor old troublesome soul,” to enjoy “our flags”.

The book ends with a short inclusion by Grandmother Newell: “Flag of our Fathers, revered through years,/ Baptized in blood, hallowed by tears,/Though all who followed thee may soon depart,/ Thy place is sacred in every “Daughter’s heart.”

“It’s been over 150 years and we can still reach across that breach of history,” Brown said. “That’s amazing when you think about it; two people can reach across time and make these connections.”

Grandmother Newell’s aren’t the only memories, Brown holds of that time.

Brown’s grandfather lived only a block and a half from the Providence armory on Benefit Street, and would often watch soldiers parade in the early mornings.

One day he saw a soldier, head in his hands, crying upon the sidewalk.

Brown’s grandfather, who was only 5 at the time, approached the soldier asking why he could have been crying because “soldiers don’t cry.”

The soldier told him that President Abraham Lincoln had been murdered.

Brown’s grandfather rushed home to tell his mother, who didn’t believe him until all the church bells throughout Providence began ringing to notify the public of the president’s assassination.

He was also told the story of ancestors who owned a Dry Goods Store in Philadelphia and immediately packed a wagon full of medical supplies and blankets upon hearing about the tragedy at the Battle of Gettysburg to help who they could.

Brown said, “We get these unvarnished stories or war, but when you look beneath there is this terrible carnage. It’s part of our heritage whether we like it or not.”

Brown said he could tell the flag “clearly meant something,” to both sides fighting the Civil War, but that today that meaning is no longer there.

“I always respected their views,” Brown said, “but I came to realize that no matter what the flag stood for originally, it was taken up by evil people. They took it up as their creed and now that flag stands for very specific purpose.”

The Confederate flag had not flown in South Carolina for decades following the Civil War, but was resurrected in April of 1961 in opposition to racial desegregation.

Brown said, “It’s not to be honored by or for veterans anymore.”

The confederate flag’s meaning was shifted and perverted by “evil people”, such as the Ku Klux Klan, racist politicians and public, Brown said.

He believes the confederate flag is not unlike the symbol of the swastika, originally a sacred symbol of peace and good fortune for Hinduism, Buddhism and other Eastern religions, that is now correlated with the horrors of the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler’s reign over Germany.

Although the Confederate flag has a place in museums, for scholars and researchers, Brown believes, the flag “had to go.”

“You can understand why it’s so offensive, all the injustices people had to suffer after the war and still,” he said.

Brown himself was witness to a few of these injustices having lived through the “tail end of that era.”

He exampled his time in San Antonio with the Army in 1954 where the local movie theatre had separate entrances for Caucasian and African American patrons, or in high school during a trip to Washington where an African American friend refused to go because it was still a segregated town.

“I didn’t know what he meant, but when I went down there we found out real fast. I hadn’t seen anything like that in my life up until then,” Brown said.

“Absolutely no doubt, we should have taken it down. It doesn’t represent what it should,” Brown said.