A dead racist and staunch defender of the Confederate flag is causing mucho problems for an Orangeburg, S.C., restaurant owner.
The drama begins with Maurice Bessinger, founder of Maurice’s Piggie Park chain of barbecue restaurants across central South Carolina.
Fox 4 reports that Bessinger was a proud segregationist, and kept scores of Confederate memorabilia in his restaurants.
A year after his 2014 death, Tommy Daras and his wife bought the Orangeburg location of his restaurant from Bessinger’s children and turned it into the Edisto River Creamery and Kitchen.
But before Bessinger died, he sold the tiny bit of land surrounding his flagpole, a little more than three-thousandths of an acre, for just five dollars to the Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 842.
Unfortunately, for this town that is more than 75 percent black, those upstanding human beings decided to fly an even larger Confederate flag at the site after the tragic Charleston AME church massacre, where nine black parishoners were killed by a young man saying he wanted to start a race war.
“From that day forward, all hell broke loose for me,” Daras recalled. “My windows were broken out, by phone was ringing off the hook, my employees were harassed. I was fist-fighting with people in the parking lot. Everyone in town assumed it was my property because it looks like it’s attached to this building.”
So far, Daras has not been able to legally take the flag down.
He has hired a lawyer, who has argued that the corner where the flag stands is zoned for commercial use and cannot be flown there. So far, the city has rejected that argument. Daras plans to appeal.
Read more at Fox4.
