1894 banner stays

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, April 18, 2001

[04/18/01] The banner that flew over Confederate soldiers during the Civil War will remain on Mississippi’s flag despite warnings it is an obstacle to racial reconciliation and economic development.

By nearly a 2-1 margin, Mississippians voted Tuesday to keep their traditional state flag, rejecting a proposed alternative that would have replaced the Confederate emblem in its upper left corner with a cluster of 20 stars on a field of blue.

With all 2,136 precincts reporting unofficial totals, the 1894 flag had 488,630 votes, or 65 percent, and a proposed new, star-studded flag had 267,812, or 35 percent.

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In Warren County, 13,889 people about 3,500 fewer than cast ballots in last fall’s presidential election, went to polling places. The majority of them, 61.5 percent, said to keep the 107-year-old banner.

State Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, who had gone door to door Sunday to drum up support for change, said he was shocked by the number of voters who wanted to keep the flag.

“I never would have dreamed that the margin would be what it was,” Flaggs said. “I really believed that Mississippians wanted to move forward with a new flag.”

As the results began coming into the Warren County Courthouse Tuesday night, initial returns appeared closer than the final numbers. There was a difference of only one vote after the first 10 of 22 county precincts reported tallies.

Areas that tipped the scales toward the current banner were traditionally conservative, white precincts such as Culkin and Bovina. At the largest polling place in the county, the old Culkin School, 1,938 marked the old flag while 503 opted for the new design. At Bovina, 442 voted for the current banner and 139 for the new.

Voters at precincts in mostly black residential areas, at Kings, St. Aloysius, American Legion, No. 7 Fire Station and Vicksburg Junior High, gave their endorsement to the design submitted by the governor’s flag commission.

The largest difference was at the American Legion Post on Monroe Street. There, 620 ballots were cast for the new design and 203 voted to keep the banner.

When asked about the impact of the tally on Mississippi, Flaggs said, “I think it’s going to leave a black eye on Mississippi, but the state has had a black eye before.”

But, the 13-year veteran of the Legislature said that the results of the vote would not affect efforts to continue to improve the state.

“I’m not going to let this get in the way of the things that we do agree on,” he said.

Lamar Roberts, a local advocate of keeping the traditional banner, said that he doesn’t expect Tuesday’s vote to end the debate, but “the people have spoken. We need to just let it go.”

Mississippi’s only black delegate to Congress, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents Warren and 21 counties in the Delta, has refused to fly the state flag in his Washington office. He said retaining it “can only further divide a diverse population.”

In neighboring Claiborne County, voters gave overwhelming support for the new design, by 2,675 votes to 719.

North of Vicksburg, the vote was much closer. In Issaquena County, 349 votes were cast for the current flag to 304 for the proposed banner. In Sharkey County, 868 voted for the current flag and 816 for the new design.

Robert Crook, a former state senator who represented the Delta, said he hoped people would accept the election results and not try to punish the state.

“I don’t think black people were upset with the flag,” Crook said “There was no hue and cry, no boycotts.”

Tuesday’s vote was part of a larger debate across the South about dealing with past racism and facing the future.

In Alabama, jury selection is under way in the trial of a white man accused in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four black girls.

South Carolina lawmakers, under economic pressure from the NAACP, last year removed a Confederate flag from atop the Statehouse dome. In January, Georgia legislators shrank the Confederate symbol that had dominated that state’s flag since 1956.

The national NAACP offered financial help $50,000 but left it to local chapters to argue the Confederate symbol hearkened back to slavery and segregation.

“As far as the outside interest, it’s none of their business what flag we fly here in Mississippi,” Roberts said.

Former Mississippi Gov. William Winter, a Democrat who led the commission that recommended the old flag be scrapped, was philosophical.

“I hope that out of this effort will come an increased understanding of our continuing obligation to work for a Mississippi that has its face turned to the future and not the past,” Winter said.

The state, with 2.8 million people, is 61 percent white and 36 percent black.

In DeSoto County, an 86 percent white county in the Memphis suburbs, the old flag won by a 6-1 margin. In Hinds, a majority-black county that’s home to the state capital, went almost 2-to-1 for the new design.

In a few majority-black counties, the vote was surprisingly close. The predominantly black Delta went for the new flag, but not overwhelmingly.

Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who appointed the flag commission and argued a new banner would help economic efforts, issued a statement saying: “It’s important that we accept the majority vote and move forward with the business of bringing new jobs and better opportunities to all Mississippians.”

While largely peaceful, the flag debate polarized some voters along racial lines, with some whites saying they support the old flag because it is the banner they saluted as children. Others see the Rebel X as a symbol of past injustices, including lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan.

Mississippi’s flag became an open question last May, when the state Supreme Court found the 1894 banner had no official standing.

The flag chosen in Tuesday’s vote was adopted by a mixed-race Legislature in 1894, some 30 years after the end of the Civil War. The battle flag emblem was described as a testament to the then still-living Confederate veterans for their valor. From the time of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the battle emblem itself has been used by the Klan and other groups espousing white supremacy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.