Confederate Flag Wristbands Handed Out At Swimming Pool Over July 4th Weekend

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (CBS Local) -- -- A woman visiting a North Carolina swimming pool over the July 4th weekend said she was shocked when she noticed that the wristband she was wearing had part of the Confederate battle flag printed on it.

Sage Magness, a former Forsyth County resident visiting for the holiday, said she went to the pool at Tanglewood Park Sunday afternoon to cool off and noticed the "red, white and blue" wristband she was given was "not the American flag."

When she took off the wristband and stretched it out, Magness said, "it was very clearly a Confederate flag."

"My 3-year-old had a Confederate flag wristband," she told the Winston-Salem Journal. "It was kind of like an out-of-body experience ... What century am I in?

Magness said she was "pretty mad because the Confederate flag is something I don't have in my life."

"I am going to take this racist wristland off," she said she told a pool staffer.

Magness said when she complained to the county's Facebook page, somebody at the county responded that the wristbands "have a generic stars and stripes pattern" and that "some of the bands and the way they were cut, can be viewed as having a similar pattern to the Confederate flag."

Magness wasn't buying it, so she sent a photo back of the band stretched out and wrote that "it isn't about how the band was cut."

The county then acknowledged the wristbands were a problem and said they were pulled them from use Monday morning and thrown away.

Deputy county manager Damon Sanders-Pratt says a young staffer who ordered the wristbands to mark the holiday mistakenly thought they were patriotic, and "didn't recognize the connotation" the "Stars and Bars" pattern symbolizes.

In:
• Confederate Flag
• North Carolina
• July 4th