As a person who was born and raised in Georgia, I can tell you to 99% certainty what the race of a person flying a confederate flag is, which is why it's a problem. People claim they fly it heritage because perhaps their great-great-great grandfather fought in the civil war on the side that went to war to perpetuate slavery (to say the civil war started for any other reason is simply wrong) and they fly it to honor their memory. Whatever, that's pretty fucked up, but whatever this is America. However, these people fail (or at least claim to fail) to recognize what the flag has been turned into (even though it was always flown by white supremacists) in the past century - namely a symbol of oppression, white supremacy, violence, and hate. Therefore there are lots of (white) people who think of their flag as a way to honor their ancestors (traitorous) wartime deeds, while many (black) people had ancestors swinging in trees right next to this flag. See the problem? Taking the flag down won't solve racism, it won't make the life of the average black person significantly better, but the fact that so many people fly it with so much pride shows that a ton of people are amazingly selfish, ignorant (willfully or not), and completely unable to empathize with those who are different than them. And that's the problem. Today's racism isn't slavery or Jim Crow Laws, it's shit like this where people just don't take the time or effort to consider the fact that the person of another race is actually still a person and perhaps, just perhaps, the things that one person finds benign could be seen as incredibly offensive by a person with a different background. Today's racism is white people saying racism is over or not raising hell when it is suggested that the confederate flag symbolizes racism. If you want to see why people think that, look at a history of Georgia's flags ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state) ). Do we think it was coincidence that turned our state's flag into an enormous confederate flag right when desegregation was happening when it had never been featured previously? So when this flag that was used as a battle flag by a treasonous band of white supremacists dedicated to perpetuating slavery, a flag that was later used by groups such as the KKK in things like lynchings, is flying on the state capitol building - the seat of the government supposedly by the people, for the people, and of the people - the day after a white supremacist whose room was decked out in this flag went to the most historic black church in the state to assassinate a black congressman and kill 8 other innocent, black churchgoers, I think it is obvious why people would find that incredibly offensive, disrespectful, and unsympathetic. To be fair, I think it got a little out of hand following that with the calls for making it illegal and whatnot, and again, I don't think this will solve any major problems, but I think we can all agree that seeing it fly from the highest point of you government after such an event is just adding insult to injury. That is why people were upset.