Make the change

Put aside Klan legacy in flag

In the 2019 session of the Arkansas General Assembly, Rep. Charles Blake, a Democrat from Little Rock, introduced a bill concerning the state flag. The bill proposed not to change the flag, but to reinterpret it to remove an allusion to Confederate supremacy that dated back to 1924.

What most people don’t know is that the 1924 law which memorialized the Confederacy on our state’s flag was sponsored by another Democratic representative from Little Rock, Neil Bohlinger, who had campaigned on the political ticket of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan was at its highest point in Arkansas and the nation during the biennium of the 1923 and 1924 Legislature. It had swept the Little Rock city elections in April 1922. Over the summer, the Klan had held a pre-primary in Pulaski County and several other counties in Arkansas to choose candidates for the forthcoming August Democratic primary. At that time, whoever won the Democratic primary would win the general election that followed. Bohlinger, an attorney, was anointed as the Klan candidate, and he ran openly as a Klansman in the August election. The Klan took all the offices in Pulaski County from county judge to sheriff on down. A Klansman, Heartsill Ragon, was elected to represent central Arkansas in the U.S. Congress.

Klan politicking took place in many other Arkansas counties, but nowhere as successfully as in Pulaski. It’s impossible to know exactly, but it is likely that the majority of the legislators who assembled in Little Rock in January 1923 were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The flag was just one issue that the assembly took up that reflected a Klan theme. In 1913 the Legislature had adopted a form of today’s flag designed by a Jefferson County woman, Willie Hocker. With stars inside blue bars making a diamond on a red background, the flag, like others created in the South at the time, has the appearance of a deconstructed Rebel flag. With the word “Arkansas” inside the white

Tdiamond were three stars representing three sovereign states which had possessed the land that became Arkansas — France, Spain, and the United States.

Bohlinger’s bill, which became law in 1923, added a fourth star to represent the Confederate States of America. In a special session the following year, Bohlinger proposed a revision to move the fourth star above the word “Arkansas” and the other three stars. This modification passed, creating the current form of the state flag.

he Klan’s previous success inspired its leaders in the summer of 1924 to hold pre-primaries to choose a slate of Klan candidates for all state offices from governor on down. This brought a power struggle that led the Democratic Party state convention in September 1924 to pass a rule outlawing preferential primaries. The attempt by the Klan to take over the Democratic Party spelled the beginning of its decline in Arkansas.

Representative Bohlinger was reelected in 1924 and served two additional terms in the state Legislature in the 1940s. He also was active in the Sons of the Confederacy, serving twice as state commander for Arkansas and as the 43rd national commander in the 1950s. The flag he created, with its Confederate star standing above the one for the United States, has remained to this day.

In 2019, Representative Blake proposed to reinterpret the fourth star to represent indigenous peoples that inhabited the region rather than the Confederacy. Blake’s bill failed to get out of committee. Perhaps now the state is ready to make the change.