Man waves Confederate flag at Obama in Tenn.

Confederate flag supporters held a demonstration during President Obama’s visit Wednesday to Nashville, Tennessee.

At least two men were spotted displaying Confederate flags alongside their pickup truck near the site of Mr. Obama’s event. One man waved a Confederate battle flag at Mr. Obama’s motorcade as it passed by.

Mr. Obama was leaving Stratton Elementary School, where he’d held an event to promote the Affordable Care Act, when reporters spotted a man waving the symbol of the Confederacy among the spectators.

“A block from school we passed a man waving a Confederate battle flag,” stated the pool report from a journalist traveling with the president. “Also lots of bystanders taking pictures.”

One of the men, Rick Martin, told the Tennessean newspaper that “it would be a pleasure to meet the president.” Some drivers honked their horns in support of the flag-wavers.

At the funeral in South Carolina last week for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a victim of the mass shooting at a black church, Mr. Obama called for the state to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol in Columbia.

“Removing the flag from this state’s Capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers,” Mr. Obama said. “It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought — the cause of slavery — was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.”

He added, “It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”