(Screenshot via.)

Activist and filmmaker Bree Newsome released her first statement after her remarkably brave and bold act of removing the Confederate flag at South Carolina’s State House, and her subsequent arrest. In an essay for Blue State Review, Newsome speaks of her motivations for scaling the pole and taking down the flag.

I realized that now is the time for true courage the morning after the Charleston Massacre shook me to the core of my being. I couldn’t sleep. I sat awake in the dead of night. All the ghosts of the past seemed to be rising.

Not long ago, I had watched the beginning of Selma, the reenactment of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and had shuddered at the horrors of history.

But this was neither a scene from a movie nor was it the past. A white man had just entered a black church and massacred people as they prayed. He had assassinated a civil rights leader.

This was not a page in a textbook I was reading nor an inscription on a monument I was visiting.

This was now.

This was real.

Read more at Blue Nation Review.