ROCK HILL, S.C. – Officials at York Technical College spent $30,000 in legal fees attempting to get out of a contract with the Sons of Confederate Veterans South Carolina, only to learn their contract is binding.

College officials held an hour-long press conference on Monday morning to chastise the media for highlighting a Sons of Confederate Veterans conference scheduled at the school for March, the Herald reports.

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Sons of Confederate Veterans signed a contract to lease the school’s Baxter M. Hood Center in Rock Hill, though college leadership was unaware of the deal until it was uncovered by the news site, which pointed out that the Confederate flag would undoubtedly be on display at the public institution.

“This is irresponsible journalism,” York Tech President Greg Rutherford said at the press event. “Do you not have ethics? Who hold you accountable? Apologize on the front page, where you condemned us.”

The Herald’s September coverage of the upcoming Convention prompted cries from the NAACP and black leaders about the “divisive” symbol of “hatred” appearing on campus, and college officials sought and paid for four legal opinions about the situation, only to learn there is not legal way to prevent the event from going forward, WCNC reports.

“If a college opens a limited public forum, the college may not deny access to that forum based on the viewpoint of the speaker nor the ground unrelated to the purpose for which the forum has been opened,” according to one of the legal opinions distributed to the media by college officials.

So instead of canceling the conference, York Tech President Greg Rutherford banned the Confederate flag and similar symbolism from campus without informing the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and vowed to shield students from the conference.

Rutherford said the school “neither now nor ever” will allow the Confederate flag to be displayed on campus.

“We deplore the Confederate flag,” he said after meeting with the NAACP and other black leaders and politicians.

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“I denounce the use of the Confederate flag and all of the negativity, racism and hatred associated with the flag,” he said.

According to the Herald:

School officials now say they intend to keep the event isolated and away from the eyes of students and others among the college community, and that no Confederate flags or other similar symbols will be allowed anywhere on the York Tech campus, including inside the Hood center.

The decision comes after black leaders spent the week condemning the college for hosting the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate flag itself.

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The Rock Hill and Western York County branches of the NAACP issued a joint statement on Thursday that denounced the event as “an underestimation of the current racial tensions in America” that “seems like a blatant disregard for the historic decision” to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse last year, the Charlotte Observer reports.

“History makes it all too clear that the ‘Confederate flag’ was more widely embraced during the resistance to reconstruction and during its resurgence as a Ku Klux Klan emblem than it did by fallen veterans of the Civil War,” Rock Hill NAACP president Jacques Days told the site.

State officials removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse last year in response to a racially motivated shooting at a Charleston church in June 2015. The alleged gunman allegedly hoped to start a race war and liked to pose with the Confederate flag on Facebook.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans told the Herald that school officials didn’t bother to contact them before imposing a campus-wide ban on the Confederate flag, the group’s primary symbol. The group opposed the removal of the flag from the Statehouse.

Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to have about 200 guests attend its March conference, where they will each receive a convention medal that “will feature a photo of our ancestor’s battle flag as it flew July 9, 2015,” the day the state removed the flag from the Statehouse, according to the convention form.

The convention form and registration materials feature the Confederate flag, as do many of the vendors who are planning to set up tables at the event.

York Tech’s vice president of business services, Marc Tarplee, said at the news conference that if the Confederate flag ban “means that some of their vendors can’t come, then that’s the way it will be.”

Rutherford also vowed to personally patrol the convention and trash any Confederate symbols he comes across.

“I will personally go around, pick them up, and put them in the trash myself,” he said.