SC Restaurant Owner Says Confederate Flag Near His Business Has Caused Fistfights

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 the Maurice’s Piggie Park chain of barbecue restaurants across central South Carolina.

Fox 4 reports that Bessinger was a proud segregationist who 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 $5 to the Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 842.

Unfortunately, for this town, which 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, S.C., African Methodist Episcopal Church massacre, when nine black parishioners 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, my phone was ringing off the hook, my employees were harassed. I was fistfighting with people in the parking lot. Everyone in town assumed [the Confederate flag] was my property because it looks like it’s attached to this building.”

So far, Daras has not been able to legally take down the flag.

He has hired a lawyer, who has argued that the corner where the flag stands is zoned for commercial use and thus the flag cannot be flown there. So far, the city has rejected that argument. Daras plans to appeal.

Read more at Fox 4.