The initial conflict arose Friday night when Dee Jordan, Vice President for External Affairs for the Council of Graduate Students, who said she is speaking on behalf of the five elected executive board members in this report, was showing a new graduate student around East Lansing.

It was then Jordan and the new graduate student, both women of color, made their way to the Zemer's Homemade Rootbeer stand, owned and operated by Chris Zemer. While in line, Jordan said a woman walked up to her and told her Zemer had a Confederate flag on the back of the his food truck.

"I was a little shocked because this is East Lansing," Jordan said. "It's a very diverse environment and (East Lansing) Mayor (Nathan) Triplett has done really, really well with diversity and so had Lou Anna K. Simon with diversity inclusion and sensitivity. So I was a little blown away."

After that, Jordan said she snapped a picture of the flag and sent it to members of the East Lansing City Council Friday night and received a response from them Saturday morning.

Jordan said she then received an email from Councilmember Ruth Beier saying she had heard Zemer was informed to remove the flag by the GLFF staff. 

However, Jordan said when she had spoke to GLFF staff Friday night, the GLFF had yet to find a diplomatic way to ask Zemer to take his flag down. At one point Saturday, Zemer had taken the flag down, but by Saturday night, the flag was back up.

"You had plenty of time to come up with any diplomatic solution," Jordan said. "Like just walking over, saying 'Hey, your flag is offensive. Let's pull it down. That's really not the image we want to conjure in our community.' It's really simple."

Jordan said Beier arrived Sunday to stage a protest, where she then had water thrown on her by Zemer. In addition to this, Zemer kept taking his flag up and down off his truck. However, as of Sunday at 3 p.m., the flag was down.

For MSU criminal justice graduate student Robert Vankirk, he said what frustrates him most is the way GLFF has handled the whole situation.

"As a citizen of East Lansing and as a student of Michigan State University, which runs this event, it's really concerning that we would allow this to happen and not just respond adequately and just ask them to leave," Vankirk said. "It seems all of this would have been avoided if they had just said, 'Hey guys, that's not an appropriate signage. We've had numerous complaints from the public. I'm sorry. We're going to have to ask you to leave.'"

In addition to this, Vankirk, who's from the Lansing area, said he's been to GLFF numerous times and has seen Zemer's truck before, but has never seen the Confederate flag in the past and feels this year's flag might stem from the Confederate flag controversy that's arisen in the past few months.

"There's not a picture in the dictionary that describes folk as one set of people," Jordan said. "It's folk festival. It should be open to everyone. More importantly, this is a public space. It's supported and maintained by taxpayer dollars, therefore everyone in the community should be welcome to attend this and not feel offended.

"So what I suggested is the Great Lakes Folk Festival organizing committee include in their contracts stern clauses regarding the posting of images that are inflammatory or exclusionary to any groups because we would feel the same way and the same outrage if a swastika was hanging up on here."