MS has new state flag. But pro-Trump Capitol riot shows the past isn’t so far away.
On Wednesday morning, Mississippi’s Senate voted to ratify the state’s new flag.
Just hours later, an unidentified man carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.
To some Coast legislators and activists who worked to change Mississippi’s flag, it was a moment of horror, but also vindication. Though many supporters of the 1894 state flag claim the emblem represents a kind of apolitical “Southern heritage,” on Wednesday it was carried by a member of a violent mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol in support of a president who counts avowed white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members among his supporters.
In that moment, the Confederate emblem was a symbol of ideology, just as Mississippians who fought for a new flag have long claimed.
And it illustrated just why Mississippi needed a new flag, they said.
James Crowell, president of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP, said the Confederate emblem “represents separatism and the superiority of the white race.”
“And that’s what it was there for the other day when they went in there,” he said of the Confederate flag at the pro-Trump riot. “It had nothing to do with heritage. What would heritage have to do with them raiding the Capitol? That wasn’t what they were out there for. They were up there to maintain their power, that they thought they had received through electing Trump as president.”
A Rebel flag in the Capitol, a first in US history
In photos that were widely circulated and dissected, a lone man carries a large, billowing Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. He carried it past portraits of John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator who called slavery a “positive good.”
The man, wearing blue jeans and a brown hoodie and vest, walked freely through the rotunda. Capitol Police had been outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed. On Thursday night, one Capitol Police officer died of injuries sustained during his confrontation with the mob.
During the Civil War, the rebel flag never got closer than six miles to the Capitol.
State Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, had spent part of Wednesday morning introducing Mississippi’s new flag to his colleagues before they voted to ratify the design 71.3% of voters approved in November. Gov. Tate Reeves is scheduled to sign the bill at 2:30 p.m. Monday.
Wiggins said he felt emotional as he reflected on the beginning of a new chapter for Mississippi, when the state would be able to “define itself with all of its good things.”
Just hours later, Wiggins had another reason to feel relieved. The Confederate flag being carried through the Capitol no longer bore any resemblance to his state flag.
“We don’t have to worry about that,” he said of the prospect of observers linking Mississippi to the Confederate emblem.
Jeffrey Hulum III, a Gulfport activist who advocated for a new flag and continues to call for the removal of Gulfport’s Confederate monument, agreed.
“I tell you, I am so happy that our state finally took the right trajectory to vote on that new flag,” he said. “If it wasn’t, they would have sworn it was Mississippi swarming that Capitol.”
History of the flag
The flag most commonly associated with the Confederate States of America was regarded as a symbol of treason for a few decades after the Civil War. But by the turn of the century, it was being incorporated into state flag designs.
Mississippi’s 1894 flag was ratified just four years after the state effectively disenfranchised Black residents.
In the late 1940s, the flag became popular across the South, just as the civil rights movement was beginning to gain momentum against segregation. In May 1948, the Dixiecrats — southern conservatives who broke away from the national Democratic Party because the party was increasingly friendly to civil rights for Black Americans — held a convention in Jackson. Historian John M. Coski writes that the streets of the city were “bedecked” with Confederate flags for the occasion.
Over the rest of the 20th century, the flag became closely linked with the KKK and opposition to civil rights, even as it was also applied to T-shirts, motorcycle jackets and beach towels. Organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans then decried the “desecration” of the flag for commercial purposes and its use by racists, Coski writes in his book “The Confederate Battle Flag.”
But their protests were largely ignored. By the 21st century, white people around the country were flying the flag not as a symbol of Southern heritage, but as a more general expression of grievance and, they claimed, patriotism.
When Dylann Roof murdered nine Black congregants at a Charleston church in 2015, after having posed for photos waving the Confederate flag, South Carolina stopped flying it.
In Mississippi, activists pushed for the state to reconsider its own flag bearing the emblem. But those efforts failed.
Then, the flag became popular at Trump rallies, from Oregon to Ohio to Florida. White supremacists waved it in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where a “Unite the Right” protester killed a counter-protester with his car.
Supporters of 1894 state flag react
Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol seems set to become another moment in the flag’s history of connection to right-wing violence. (The man in the now-famous photographs has not been identified, and he could be from anywhere in the country.)
But in Mississippi, those now working to return the flag issue to the ballot say the Confederate battle flag has nothing to do with the 1894 state flag.
Holly Scanlon of Stone County spent Wednesday in Jackson, attending a Stop the Steal rally at the state Capitol and collecting signatures for Let Mississippi Vote. That group is aiming to present four flag designs, including the 1894 state flag, to voters through the state’s ballot initiative process.
What did she think when she saw the photos of a Confederate flag in the U.S. Capitol?
“I don’t have a reaction to that because our flag is not the Confederate battle flag,” she said. “Our flag is the Mississippi state flag.”
Scanlon said she wasn’t concerned about negative associations with the emblem, or what the man carrying it might have intended it to mean.
“A lot of cults steal our Bible,” she said. “A lot of cults use our Bible in their cults for bad ways. But that doesn’t mean that our Bible is wrong.”
Mark Hudson Sr. of Kiln opposed taking down the 1894 flag and regards the battle flag as a banner of his Southern roots. But he didn’t think it belonged at the Capitol on Wednesday.
“The Confederate flag, that shouldn’t have been up there, nowhere near that,” he said. “Because what does the rebel flag, what did that have to do with what was going on up there? Nothing, not a thing.”
To many progressives in Mississippi, however, it made perfect sense to see the Confederate flag waving at a pro-Trump uprising.
“We have always maintained that the Confederate emblem is a treasonous symbol of white supremacy, and the fact that these fascist white nationalists carried this symbol during their coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol validates everything we have repeatedly stated for the past 6 years,” Lea Campbell, president and founder of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, wrote in an email.
‘That rebel flag always shows up’
Rep. Sonya Williams-Barnes, D-Gulfport, said she believed those who say the battle flag represents their heritage, and she respects that perspective. But to her, it was always a symbol of racist oppression, and that’s what it looked like on Wednesday.
“Seeing it along with the other white supremacists that were terrorizing the United States Capitol, it fit right in,” she said. “And any time you see racial divides within our country, especially when it is pertaining to African Americans and white supremacists... that rebel flag always shows up.”
Her Coast colleagues shared the sense that what happened in Washington was an object lesson in the value of a new state flag.
“To see the [Confederate] flag being marched into our U.S. Capitol... just reiterates the need for us to have removed such a hateful emblem on our state flag,” said Rep. Jeramey Anderson, D-Moss Point.
National commentators noted that Wednesday’s violence, almost entirely perpetrated by white Americans, overshadowed the news that Raphael Warnock had become only the second Black U.S. senator from the South since Reconstruction, and Georgia’s first-ever Black senator.
Mississippi’s final steps toward officially retiring the 1894 state flag barely made headlines, even inside the state.
And that might mark the start of a new era in which Mississippi’s state flag, like most of its peers around the country, is a boring subject.
What might have been the fallout for Mississippi if the 1894 state flag was still flying on Wednesday? Wiggins said there was no point in discussing a hypothetical.
“That’s not an issue as far as I’m concerned anymore,” he said.
This story was originally published January 9, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
