South Carolina lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to consider removing the Confederate flag from their Statehouse grounds and other politicians took aim at Civil War-era symbols across the South, saying change is imperative after police said nine black churchgoers were slain in a hate crime.

More than 70 years after South Carolina sent a 14-year-old black boy to the electric chair in the killings of two white girls in a segregated mill town, a judge threw out the conviction, saying the state committed a great injustice.