The South Carolina Senate moved on Monday to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in response to recent church shootings in Charleston.

In a preliminary vote, a measure to lower the flag won Senate approval 37 to 3. The Senate is expected take a final vote on Tuesday and send the measure to the House, where it is expected to pass this week.

The battle flag has still been flying since a white man allegedly killed nine black churchgoers in a racially motivated shooting in Charleston on June 17. Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has called for the flag’s removal, and Republican lawmakers across the South have joined her. But a compromise in 2000 that pushed the flag off the capitol dome left the state legislature in sole command of the flag’s fate.

With the decision to lower the flag all but assured, lawmakers spent much of Monday reflecting on its place in history. Here are five themes that developed during the debate:

State Sen. Vincent Sheheen (D), who lost to Haley in the 2010 and 2014 gubernatorial races, is the sponsor of the measure. He has advocated taking down the flag for several years.

Last year, as he campaigned near the Confederate war memorial, he recalled a tense debate with a white woman who walked up to him and said, “All you care about is black people and Mexicans.”

More recently, Sheheen said, he received an email from a constituent who wants the flag to keep waving despite the Charleston shootings. “It’s not about the Confederate flag. It’s about the entitlement given to minorities, and folks are getting tired of it,” the email said.

Sheheen said: “That’s days after nine people are murdered because their skin was dark. There’s a quiet bigotry that still exists, and if those of us who are white don’t say anything . . . then we’re part of the problem.”

During the Civil War, South Carolina was more than half black, noted state Sen. Darrell Jackson (D), who is African American. Those people – and their descendants – did not view the flag with the same reverence as many white South Carolinians do. Keeping it on the statehouse grounds projects just one vision of the Confederacy, Jackson said.

“When I see a Confederate soldier, I don’t get goosebumps and feel all warm and fuzzy,” he said. “I respect the fact that you do. All I’m saying is, you can’t force all of us to have a passion that some of you have about certain things.”

State Sen. Larry Martin (R) said he has heard from many people who oppose taking down the flag, because if that happened, what would be next? Would buildings and roads have to be renamed?

But that’s the wrong way to look at it, Martin said, urging South Carolinians to be honest with themselves: The Confederate flag was hoisted over the capitol in the 1960s to mark the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. But it stayed up, he said, to demonstrate resistance to the civil rights movement.

“I remember well the adults in my life and what they had to say about” public school integration, said Martin, who is white. “And it wasn’t pleasant. You couldn’t repeat it today, about what was being said about the fact that we were going to be going to school with black children. And the adults in my life didn’t want to hear it. In my view, that’s the reason the flag stayed up.”

Martin said that before the Charleston shootings, he never thought twice about the Confederate flag. Now, he said, he sees “a huge difference between a (Confederate) monument and a flag fluttering in the wind on state grounds.”

“To see that thing fluttering out there in a way that sort of gives some official status to it on behalf of the people of South Carolina, that doesn’t represent all of the people of South Carolina, and we need to remember that,” he said.

“It isn’t part of our future,” he added. “It’s part of our past.”

State Sen. Lee Bright (R) argued that pervasive racism is not a problem in South Carolina. The problem, he said, is one man with a gun.

“I am more against taking (the flag) down in this environment than any other time,” Bright said. “We’re placing blame on what one deranged lunatic did on people who hold their Southern heritage high, and I don’t think that’s fair.”

Bright said he thinks most South Carolinians want the flag to stay up, and he called for a statewide referendum on the matter.

That proposal was immediately rejected.