A deep blue, a palmetto, a crescent. Charleston's flag is one of the most beautiful in the country, and one of the few whose every element was won in battle.
The crescent comes from the caps of the Carolina militia, the palmetto from June 1776: on Sullivan's Island, Colonel Moultrie's fort of palmetto logs took the broadsides of the British fleet without breaking. The spongy wood absorbed the cannonballs; the British gave up. From that victory came the state's nickname, the Palmetto State, and the emblem the city still carries.
It was also at Charleston, at Fort Sumter, that the Civil War began in April 1861. And it was here, in 2015, that a white supremacist murdered nine worshippers at Emanuel AME Church.
The palmetto and crescent fly, elegant and proud, above a city that learned liberty and denied it in the same breath, and whose most beautiful of flags tells only half of it.