Mississippi flag retains Confederate emblem despite calls for its removal

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/17/mississippi-state-flag-confederate-symbol

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Weeks after the shooting dead of nine black worshippers in a Charleston church in June, by an alleged gunman who appeared online brandishing the Confederate battle flag, South Carolina lawmakers voted to remove the banner from the statehouse grounds in Columbia.

Related: South Carolina's Confederate flag comes down as history of hate meets modernity

Critics also called for Mississippi to remove the rebel emblem from its state flag. Midway through October, that has not happened.

Mississippi’s top elected officials have largely ignored the state flag, which has flown since 1894 and which features the Confederate battle emblem in the upper-left corner.

Republican governor Phil Bryant is seeking a second term in a 3 November election, and has said he will not call Mississippi legislators into special session to debate the flag. Legislators ended their regular session in early April, more than two months before what police said was a racially motivated attack at Emanuel African American Episcopal Church in Charleston.

“If the legislature had been in session at the time the Mother Emanuel tragedy happened, I think the momentum and the pressure to remove the symbol at that time would have carried the day,” said Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

“The emotion and the shock of that was very powerful … It’s easy for emotions to subside.”

A few politicians have called for change, including Philip Gunn, Mississippi’s first Republican House speaker since Reconstruction. Gunn is a leader in his local Baptist church, and said faith caused him to see the flag as “a point of offense that needs to be removed”.

Flag supporters, including some Sons of Confederate Veterans, responded with yard signs and bumper stickers emblazoned with “Keep the Flag. Change the Speaker”.

Several Mississippi cities and counties have stopped flying the state flag, citing it as a racially divisive symbol in a state where nearly 38% of 2.9 million residents are African American.

A Jackson resident is starting a petition drive to put a change-the-flag initiative on the statewide ballot, and flag supporters hope to start their own keep-the-flag initiative – but the earliest either proposal could go to voters is in 2018. Many are hoping for some sort of resolution to the public debate before then.

Bryant and Republican lieutenant governor Tate Reeves are challenged by Democrats running low-budget campaigns, and both incumbents say if the flag design is to be reconsidered it should be done by a statewide vote, and not by legislators. Both Democrats are calling for change.

Robert Gray, a truck driver who won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination after not even voting for himself, said the Confederate emblem on the state flag was like a sign for people to stay away.

“If you have 50 bottles of wine and you take a warning label and put it on one of the bottles, which one could people go to first? They’re not going to go to the bottle with the warning label on it, at all,” Gray said.

Tim Johnson, a former state senator who switched from Republican to Democrat to run for lieutenant governor, said he voted to keep the Confederate emblem in 2001 but now thinks it should be removed.

“You don’t hold on to something that’s holding you back,” he said.

Bryant said: “I’ve never had a company say, ‘We can’t come to Mississippi because of the flag.’”

Related: Progressive rebels in the American south fight a flag – and the Klansman next door

Lieutenant Governor Reeves, like Bryant, said the flag has never been an obstacle to job creation.

“The people of Mississippi voted, overwhelmingly, in 2001 to keep our state flag as it currently exists. And I believe the only way the flag should be changed is if the people of our state decide to change it,” Reeves said.

The Mississippi supreme court ruled in 2000 that the flag, while widely used, had not been enshrined in state law since code books were updated in 1906. A flag commission held several public hearings that devolved into shouting matches in the fall of 2000.

After that, legislators put the matter to a statewide vote in April 2001, with two choices: the 1894 flag and an alternative that would have replaced the rebel emblem with circles of stars to represent Mississippi as the 20th state. By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters kept the old flag.

Fourteen years later, some Mississippi residents still embrace the Confederate-themed banner.

“I think it should stay the same. It’s part of our heritage,” said Cynthia Moak, a 33-year-old white homemaker in the southern Mississippi city of McComb.

Others said it was beyond time to find a unifying flag.

“This is a new era now. That flag kind of reminds us of the past,” said Myrtle Alexander, 45, of McComb, who is black and works as a district manager for a food company.

McComb, a small city about 80 miles south of Jackson, has a significant history regarding civil rights. For much of the 1950s and 60s, McComb was controlled by the Ku Klux Klan and earned a reputation as a bombing capital because of violent resistance to black voting rights and integration.

Alexander said her parents remained in McComb through those times, but “it was very hard for them”.

The Mississippi flag still flutters outside McComb city hall.

“Whenever you see that flag,” Alexander said, “it kind of brings back bad memories.”