As the nation has celebrated its birthday with displays of its contemporary power and prestige, a historic symbol came under fire.

Sportswear company Nike pulled sneakers depicting the 13-star banner known as the Betsy Ross flag after former NFL football player Colin Kaepernick, who has a sponsorship deal with Nike, reportedly objected: The flag, which dates to the era of 18th-century slavery, has occasionally been used by white supremacists and other far-right groups.

The Betsy Ross flag, which might not have been designed or sewn by the Philadelphia-based upholsterer, has been a largely uncontroversial symbol in American history, often displayed at presidential inaugurations. At President Barack Obama’s, it hung prominently from the Capitol building along with other historic U.S. flags.

Like many symbols of America, the 13-star flag has on rare occasions been brandished by members of far-right movements, according to Mark Pitcavage, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of investigative research and a historian by training. But it has not been adopted or appropriated by the far right in the way that the Gadsden flag, with its “Don’t Tread On Me” message, is now associated with the tea party.

“It’s not a hate symbol,” Pitcavage said.

The Betsy Ross flag does not appear on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of 179 hate symbols, which includes some drawn from America’s own past, such as the Confederate flag, which the Charlottesville marchers brandished in 2017 as they shouted racist and anti-Semitic slogans.

The online database includes an invitation to viewers to write in and suggest symbols.

“No one has ever written in suggesting the Betsy Ross flag, to my recollection,” Pitcavage said.

John Coski, a historian at the American Civil War Museum, warned against simplifying what historic symbols stand for. Over the years, the Confederate flag has been “a widely and carelessly used symbol of many things, including the South as a distinctive region, individual rebelliousness, a self-conscious ‘redneck’ culture, and segregation and racism,” Coski wrote in his 2005 book, “The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem.”

The Gadsden flag, named after the 18th-century general and politician Christopher Gadsden, has also been used as a countercultural and anarchist emblem.

Fitzhugh Brundage, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — where student protesters last year tore down a Confederate statue known as Silent Sam — said that the meaning of symbols has always shifted. But today, he said, a historic symbol can be contaminated almost overnight.

“In a universe in which memes come and go in a matter in weeks, what is the half-life of that contamination?” he asked. “When can the Betsy Ross flag go back to what is was before it was contaminated?”

Eric Hobeck in Charlottesville, Virginia, contributed to this story.

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