The company disavowed the flag's appearance at the rally. The flag made an appearance at the deadly 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which gathered white supremacist groups, including the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan. The flag, however, has been adopted by the conservative activists to show solidarity with the police, and it has also been picked up by far-right extremist groups as well. 'It's a flag to show support for law enforcement - no politics involved.' 'The flag has no association with racism, hatred, bigotry,' Jacob, now the president of the Thin Blue Line USA, told The Marshall Project. Flag creator Andrew Jacob formed the idea to 'give the police a flag to wave' amid the backlash against police officers in light of the deaths of Black men and boys - Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice - at the hands of the police, Jeff Sharlet wrote in Harper's Magazine. The Blue Lives Matter movement was aimed at advocating for law enforcement. The phrase had also morphed through an assortment of colors throughout the remainder of the century - including a 'thin red line of freemasons in crimson collars, a thin white line of bishops, a 'thin blue line' of public schoolboys in blazers and straw hats, a thin brown line of Egyptian soldiers (a reference to skin color),' according to the book. The phrase 'caught on with a public always receptive to romantic images of war, and thin red line - sometimes with 'of heroes' added for good measure - became a rhetorical appellation for the British army and British military might and grit generally,' they wrote.

In the book 'Lawtalk: The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions,' co-authors Elizabeth Thornburg and James Clapp wrote that the original phrase was coined during the Crimean War, referring to the red-coated British army.

Here's how the simple phrase of the 'Thin Blue Line' came to be wrought with so much controversy: The phrase 'Thin Blue Line' dates back to the 1800s in London - but referencing a different colorĭating back to the 1850s, the 'Thin Blue Line' was originally red.

Blue and black flag