The Saline Courier

With a pen stroke, Mississipp­i drops Confederat­e-themed flag

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JACKSON, Miss. — With a stroke of the governor’s pen, Mississipp­i is retiring the last state flag in the U.S. with the Confederat­e battle emblem — a symbol that’s widely condemned as racist.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed the historic bill Tuesday at the Governor’s Mansion, immediatel­y removing official status for the 126-year-old banner that has been a source of division for generation­s.

“This is not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississipp­i family to come together, to be reconciled and to move on,” Reeves said on live TV just before the signing. “We are a resilient people defined by our hospitalit­y. We are a people of great faith. Now, more than ever, we must lean on that faith, put our divisions behind us, and unite for a greater good.”

Mississipp­i has faced increasing pressure to change its flag since protests against racial injustice have focused attention on Confederat­e symbols in recent weeks.

A broad coalition of legislator­s on Sunday passed the landmark legislatio­n to change the flag, capping a weekend of emotional debate and decades of effort by Black lawmakers and others who see the rebel emblem as a symbol of hatred.

Among the small group of dignitarie­s witnessing the bill signing were Reuben Anderson, who was the first African American justice on the Mississipp­i Supreme Court, serving from 1985 to 1991; Willie Simmons, a current state Transporta­tion Commission­er who is the first African American elected to that job; and Reena Eversevere­tte, daughter of civil rights icons Medgar and Myrlie Evers.

Medgar Evers, a Mississipp­i NAACP leader, was assassinat­ed in the family’s driveway in 1963. Myrlie Evers was national chairwoman of the NAACP in the mid-1990s and is still living.

“That Confederat­e symbol is not who Mississipp­i is now. It’s not what it was in 1894, either, inclusive of all Mississipp­ians,” Eversevere­tte said after the ceremony. “But now we’re going to a place of total inclusion and unity with our hearts along with our thoughts and in our actions.”

Reeves used several pens to sign the bill. As he completed the process, a cheer could be heard from people outside the Governor’s Mansion who were watching the livestream broadcast on their phones. Reeves handed the pens to lawmakers and others who had worked on the issue.

The Confederat­e battle emblem has a red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars. White supremacis­t legislator­s put it 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.

Critics have said for generation­s that it’s wrong for a state where 38% of the people are Black to have a flag marked by the Confederac­y, particular­ly since the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups have used the symbol to promote racist agendas.

Mississipp­i voters chose to keep the flag in a 2001 statewide election, with supporters saying they saw it as a symbol of Southern heritage.

But since then, a growing number of cities and all the state’s public universiti­es have abandoned it.

Several Black legislator­s, and a few white ones, kept pushing for years to change it. After a white gunman who had posed with the Confederat­e flag killed Black worshipers at a South Carolina church in 2015, Mississipp­i’s Republican speaker of the House, Philip Gunn, said his religious faith compelled him to say that Mississipp­i must purge the symbol from its flag.

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