Confederate flag banner flies over Bristol Motor Speedway to flout NASCAR’s ban

A Confederate flag banner was flown over the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee on Wednesday ahead of NASCAR’s All-Star Race.

The banner flown over the Wednesday race also included the website “SCV.org,” a website operated by the organization The Sons of Confederate Veterans, USA Today reported. The organization also claimed credit for a banner showing the Confederate flag that was flown over a race in Talladega last month.

Bristol Herald Courier reporter Tim Dodson shared footage of the banner Wednesday.

Someone is currently flying around the Bristol Motor Speedway with a Confederate flag banner.

This comes after NASCAR’s decision last month to ban the display of Confederate flags at its events. pic.twitter.com/zjicfr0sWf

— Tim Dodson (@Tim_Dodson) July 15, 2020

NASCAR in June banned displays of the flag at all of its events and properties, saying that it “runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry.” 

A push to remove Confederate flags, statues and other memorials has been reignited after the death of George Floyd this year. Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died in May after a then-Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest.

Last month, a noose was found in the garage of NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, the racing circuit’s only Black driver. An FBI investigation found that the noose was a garage door pull that had been there since last year and not a hate crime directed at him.

“Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could have known Mr. Wallace would be assigned to garage number 4 last week,” the FBI said in a statement last month.  

However, Wallace dismissed the investigation last month, telling “CNN Tonight” anchor Don Lemon that “We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots being as their evidence, go ahead, but from the evidence that we have — and I have — it’s a straight-up noose.”