If you aren't from here, haven't grown up here, live here, then you are talking out of your ass.
Roof is from there, grew up there, and lives there. I think he's made his view on what the Confederacy flag stands for quite clear. Nor does your testimony contradict his.
The oppression and racism thing ended down here back in the 60's. You just don't see that here anymore and no..the Stars and Bars for my lifetime has not been use or seen as something for oppression.
Yet here we have an incident of just that: someone who identifies with the Confederacy and southern pride murdering blacks for living like humans (that is, not knowing their place). How do you reconcile the fact that such things happen with your claim that they don't?
It was a backdrop for a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, nothing more than that level of southern pride thing.
For you it was. For a black church, the Confederacy flag is a backdrop for a racially motivated terrorist strike. That, too, is a southern pride thing.
That said, simply banning the flag won't do anything to help the situation. It can't cast Confederacy's dispersed essence the rest of the way into oblivion because, as you keep demonstrating, it's part of a lot of people's identities; such cultural excorcism would be extremely painful, just like de-nazification was painful for post-war Germany. Nor does redeeming it seem possible, since there's no entity left which could represent it - after all, the Confederacy is no longer embodied by a political system, but lingering cultural influences. So that leaves it free to continue its war from the shadows, claiming a victim here and another there and then using those possessed meat-puppets to murder other people, incapable of coordinated action but also almost invulnerable to a counter-attack due to its intangible and distributed nature.
Issues like this are why I believe we desperately need to put resources into developing social "sciences" into real science and corresponding technology. Because then the question becomes: how do you precisely identify the memetic organism - or "spirit" - the Confederacy flag represents, remove unwanted elements - such as racism - and put the rest back together so the result is able to outcompete the original in the cultural ecosystem? No, not outcompete, "upgrade" or "reinterpretation" would be better terms.
Because, as a certain other terrorist demonstrated, lingering darkness coming out of hiding, possessing people and causing havok is hardly an issue limited to America. And it's just a matter of time before one happens to get access to nukes rather than a mere rifle.