Confederate flag losing prominence 155 years after Civil War
Mississippi rebel-themed flag fading away
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, June 30, (AP): Long a symbol of pride to some and hatred to others, the Confederate battle flag is losing its place of official prominence 155 years after rebellious Southern states lost a war to perpetuate slavery.
Mississippi’s Republican-controlled Legislature voted Sunday to remove the Civil War emblem from the state flag, a move that was both years in the making and notable for its swiftness amid a national debate over racial inequality following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Mississippi’s was the last state flag to include the design.
NASCAR, born in the South and still popular in the region, banned the rebel banner from races earlier this month, and some Southern localities have removed memorials and statues dedicated to the Confederate cause. A similar round of Confederate flag and memorial removals was prompted five years ago by the slaying of nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. A white supremacist was convicted of the shooting.
Make no mistake: The Confederate flag isn’t anywhere close to being gone from the South. Just drive along highways where Sons of Confederate Veterans members have erected gigantic battle flags or stop by Dixie General Store, where Bob Castello makes a living selling hundreds of rebel-themed shirts, hats, car accessories and more in an east Alabama county named for a Confederate officer, Gen Patrick Cleburne.
“Business is very good right now,” Castello said Monday.
But even Castello is surprised by how demonstrations over police brutality became a wave that seems to be washing over generations of adoration for the Confederate battle flag by some. He wonders what might happen next.
“This could go on and on,” he said. “There’s just no limit to where they could go with it.”
The Confederacy was founded in Montgomery in 1861 with a Constitution that prohibited laws “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” The South lost, slavery ended, and Confederate sympathizers almost ever since have argued the war wasn’t just about slavery, instead advocating the “lost cause” version centered around state’s rights, Southern nobility and honor.
To some, the Confederate battle flag – with its red background, blue X and white stars – is a down-home symbol of Southern heritage and pride. The band Alabama, one of the top-selling country music groups ever, included the banner on five album covers in the 1980s and ‘90s while at the height of its popularity.
Patty Howard, who was visiting a huge carving of Confederate Civil War generals at Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park with her husband, Toby, on Monday, said they aren’t offended by the flag, but they also don’t fly it at their home in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
“I don’t see it as related to slavery,” said Howard, 71. “To us, it just represents being from the South.”
But the flag has a dark side. It has been waved for decades by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who oppose equal rights. The banner’s use by such groups, combined with a widening sense that it is time to retire the symbol of a defeated nation once and for all, has led to change.
“The argument over the 1894 flag has become as divisive as the flag itself and it’s time to end it,” Mississippi Gov Tate Reeves said of the state’s current flag, which was adopted by lawmakers at a time when white supremacists were actively squelching political power that African Americans had gained after the Civil War.
Georgia – which added the battle emblem to its state flag in 1956 in response to US Supreme Court decisions to desegregate public schools – adopted a flag without a rebel banner in 2003.
Alabama flew the battle flag atop its state Capitol until 1993, when it was removed following protests by Black legislators. Additional Confederate flags were removed from around a massive Confederate memorial just outside the building in 2015, when South Carolina also removed its battle flag from the state Capitol grounds after the shooting.
It has taken longer in Mississippi. Not long after the Charleston shooting, House Speaker Philip Gunn became the state’s first prominent Republican to say the Confederate symbol on the state flag was morally offensive and must be changed. People posted signs with the slogan, “Keep the Flag. Change the speaker,” but Gunn was easily reelected twice.
During the past month, Gunn and Mississippi’s firstyear lieutenant governor, Republican Delbert Hosemann, persuaded a diverse, bipartisan coalition of legislators that changing the flag was inevitable and they should be part of it.
Hosemann is the great-grandson of a Confederate soldier, Lt Rhett Miles, who was captured at Vicksburg and requested a pardon after the war ended in 1865.
“After he had fought a war for four years, he admitted his transgressions and asked for full citizenship,” Hosemann said during the debate. “If he were here today, he’d be proud of us.”
The Mississippi flag is fading from public display in many places, even before the governor signs a bill that will retire the last state banner in the US that includes the Confederate battle emblem.
A broad coalition of legislators passed the landmark bill Sunday after a weekend of emotional debate. On Monday, a US flag fluttered outside the state Supreme Court building and a pole for the state flag stood vacant. Several local governments also furled the 126-year-old state banner.
“In the middle of a pandemic, we – the legislators of the state of Mississippi – decided that it was past time to remove the flag,” Democratic state Rep Oscar Denton of Vicksburg said Monday as he stood on the Capitol steps with other Legislative Black Caucus members.
Widespread protests in the past month have focused attention on racial injustice in the US, and Mississippi came under increasing pressure to surrender the flag that has the Confederate emblem – a red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars.
A few supporters of the flag marched outside the Mississippi Capitol with it Saturday and Sunday. Inside the building, dozens of spectators cheered and some wept with happiness after legislators voted to change the flag. Senators on opposite sides of the issue embraced.
Republican Gov Tate Reeves is expected to sign the flag bill this week, and the banner will be removed from state law. It still flew Monday on two poles atop the Capitol, signaling that the House and Senate were working.
White supremacist legislators put the Confederate emblem on the upper-left corner of the Mississippi flag in 1894, as white people were squelching political power that African Americans had gained after the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups have used the rebel emblem, and critics have said for generations that it’s wrong for a state with a 38 percent Black population to have the image on its flag.
In a 2001 statewide election, Mississippi voters chose to keep the flag, with supporters saying they see it as a symbol of heritage. But, a growing number of cities and all the state’s public universities have abandoned it in recent years because of the Confederate image.
Several Black legislators, and a few white ones, have pushed for decades to change the flag. After a white gunman killed Black worshippers at a South Carolina church in 2015, Mississippi’s Republican speaker of the House, Philip Gunn, said his own religious faith compelled him to say that Mississippi must purge the Confederate symbol from its flag.
Until recently, though, the flag issue was broadly considered too volatile for legislators to touch.