and from atlanta is isabella wilkerson, the pulitzer-prize winning author of "the warmth of other suns" about southern black migration. we welcome all three of you to the program. wilson -- russell moore let me start with you. what role does the confederate flag play in the identity of the south today do you believe? >> i think confederate battle flag is a symbol that causes a great deal of division and reminds us of a hurtful legacy and past. i think people see it in different ways. what some people see in the confederate flag is a sense of southern assertion that the south matters. so for instance i was at a conference one time where the speaker, every time he would reference saying something ignorant, would do it in a southern accent. i think there are some southerners, black and white who feel as though the rest of the country looks down on the south as uneducated and backward, and for some people that was a similar balance of defiance against that, but it's really clear the way the confederate battle flag has been used, not only initially in terms of the confed ral states of ameri

i think we're changing the national conversation. >> woodruff: isabella wilkerson, what do you see when you look at the south and you begin to take the confederacy clearly as part of the history but when you take honoring the confederacy, you begin the take that out of the south and the picture of the south today? >> well, i think we're at a karmic moment for the south, but for our country as a whole. you think about the last four years in which historically speaking we've been commemorating the sen ten cal of the sieve war. south carolina was first state to si seed from the union. south carolina was where the first shots were fired and this past week the massacre at mother emanuel a.m.e. church occurred on the night before juneteenth, which is a sacred day for african americans the day when the last enslaved people were set free in texas which was two and a half years after the emancipation proclamation. so this history is inescapable. it seems as if we're coming full circle. and the history and as it's playing itself out even know seems to be inevitable. >> woodruff: russell more, for