The South Carolina legislature’s lopsided vote in response to Gov. Nikki Haley’s call to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds suggests a corner has been turned in that state. That leaves a much greater challenge in two other Southern states with far more egregious official expressions of Confederate symbolism.
Whereas South Carolina flies just a single flag from the ground well below the U.S. and state flags on the capital dome, Mississippi and Georgia fly Confederate flags not only atop their capitol domes, but at every courthouse and city hall across their states.
Mississippi features the Confederate battle flag – the X-shaped “Southern Cross” – on its official state flag. Georgia uses the first official flag of the Confederacy – the “Stars and Bars.”
Though Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn and U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, both Republicans, are calling for removal of the Confederate flag, it won’t be easy in either state. In 2001, by a two-to-one margin, Mississippians rejected a proposal to ditch the battle flag. That same year, the Georgia state legislature voted to remove the battle flag from its state flag, but in 2002 Republican gubernatorial candidate Sonny Purdue campaigned and won on a pledge to put the flag to referendum, leading to adoption in 2004 of the lesser-known Confederate stars and bars.
Those who defend official display of Confederate symbols argue they serve as symbols of regional “heritage.” But what exactly is that heritage? The Constitution of the Confederate States of America, adopted on March 11, 1861, was built around a clause stating, “No … law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”
Ten days later, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explained the new constitution this way: “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution,” he said, “were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.”
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
There is no trace of ambiguity here. That meaning is not lost either to members of the Ku Klux Klan or to modern white supremacists like Dylann Roof.
Further evidence that this is the real “heritage” underlying official use of these flags comes from the history of their adoption as state symbols. From the Civil War until 1894, Mississippi flew the “magnolia flag,” with a beautiful flowering magnolia tree as its centerpiece. Then, as they enacted Jim Crow laws and repudiated Reconstruction, state legislators switched to a design incorporating the Confederate battle flag.
Similarly, just two years after Reconstruction ended in 1877, Georgia Democratic legislators exchanged a blue flag bearing the state seal for a design modeled on the stars and bars. Then, in 1956, following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision desegregating public schools, Georgia lawmakers advertised their defiance by switching to the battle flag. In 2003, steering a middle path between the sensitivities of their black minority and white majority, they reverted to the stars and bars, which, being less well known, now functions as stealth recognition of the Confederacy.
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