Mississippi -- A State Still Under the Heat of Oppression

State Flag of Mississippi

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream Speech” on August 28th, 1963

Those famous words of Dr. King remind us of a time when segregation and inequality had a firm grip on blacks in the Deep South. Thank God all of that has changed. Or has it? A banner of division still flies over public grounds in the State of Mississippi.

Now, in June 2020, the NCAA announced that Mississippi teams can no longer host college baseball and basketball regionals until the state changes its flag. The NCAA announcement came after a group of former Mississippi college athletes petitioned the NCAA to stop holding post-season events until the state changes its flag.

Mississippi State and Ole Miss, the two SEC schools in Mississippi, refuse to fly the state flag. So do the other six state-supported universities. So do the cities of Oxford, Starkville, and Hattiesburg. Jackson, the state’s largest city won’t fly the flag. It also came down recently in Gulfport, the second most populated Mississippi city.

Mississippi is the only state that was part of the Confederacy and has not chosen to remove the rebel insignia from it’s flag. All other southern states have cut ties with the Confederate battle flag. The last state to make such a change was Georgia, which adopted a new flag in 2003 after coming under increased pressure from business and other organizations threatening to boycott the state.

NASCAR, which has been a haven for Confederate flags throughout its history, has banned the banner. In June 2020, the Delta Council, which opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, came out in favor of changing the flag.

The archaic flag of Mississippi is a disgrace to the state and to the nation. Flags are powerful symbols that signify dominion and sovereignty and express personal and political allegiance to a state or nation. Used by states and nations, they are not just strips of fabrics and colors left to random interpretation. Flags represent people – all people under their territorial dependency.

Mississippi has used the Confederate emblem in its flag since 1894, when white supremacists in state government adopted it after Reconstruction. Georgia put a large Confederate battle symbol on its state flag in 1956, during a backlash to the civil rights movement. That state purged the symbol from its banner in 2001 – the same year Mississippi voters overwhelmingly chose to keep it on their flag.

Voters in Mississippi had two choices in 2001: keep the current flag, adopted in 1894, with the Confederate emblem of 13 white stars on a blue X, or adopt a new flag with 20 white stars on a blue square, to symbolize Mississippi's role as the 20th state. They chose the banner with the “heritage” of the Confederacy.

The 2001 flag referendum vote totals showed 64 percent of voters affirmed the current state flag design. That same year, 36 percent of voters favored a new, specific flag design – one that critics at the time said was a political stunt to sway voters from voting against the current design.

Opinion has changed. A September 2017 survey of Mississippi voters by Jackson-based Chism Strategies showed that just 49 percent of Mississippians favored the current state flag while 41 percent want to retire it and 10 percent are undecided about the issue.

The same group polled residents in 2020. Chism now finds forty-six percent support retaining the old flag compared to 44.9 percent who support changing it. In terms of polling, the outcome would essentially be considered a statistical tie.

Why the significant stubborn resistance to change? The state evidently feels the need to continue its support of Confederate history by using the Civil War battle symbol as an icon of the Lost Cause. And, some Mississippi residents actually believe the flag is of no consequence concerning the problem of racism. One man said …

"I don't think the flag is the concern. I'm concerned more with the hearts and minds of people. A piece of cloth with stars on it ain't going to change nothing.”

Rather than look to its past, it is time for Mississippi to look to its future and that means change. For Mississippi to show that it cares about its citizens who are not white, they have to take down the flag.

Ronnie Crudup Sr., administrative bishop for the Fellowship of International Churches, said that when his father and other black soldiers were together in their dress uniforms after returning to Mississippi from the Korean War, a white man used a racial slur against them and told them nothing had changed.

“By not changing the flag,” Crudup said, “we’re saying to the world: ‘Nothing has changed.'”

(Emily Wagster Pettus. “Mississippi faces reckoning on Confederate emblem in flag.”

PBS News Hour. June 13, 2020.)

I hear you Mr. Crudup. I pray all the citizens of Mississippi hear you too.