Over more than 27 years in politics, Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs Jr. has received awards for service in the Legislature and to the state, and as Vicksburg’s mayor, but he said the award he received Jan. 31 from the Magnolia Bar Association may be the most important.

The Magnolia Bar, a state association for African-American lawyers, honored Flaggs as one of its five Harriet Tubman Award recipients for 2015. The award recognizes individuals or organizations that have distinguished themselves within the African-American community as trailblazers and stalwarts in business, civil rights, religion and/or politics. The recipients must demonstrate courage and dedication toward creating opportunities for minorities while setting aside personal goals.

The award comes one month after Flaggs received the Henry Mayfield award for community service presented by Greater Grove Street Missionary Baptist Church.

“I did not realize how significant it was until I looked back and saw who had been recognized previously,” Flaggs said. “To be placed in a category of such people of distinction, it is probably the most highest honor and humbling recognition that I have probably received.

Named after abolitionist and former slave Harriet Tubman, the award is presented by other civic and professional groups across the nation.

“That’s the reason it’s such a humbling experience,” Flaggs said, adding he has read about Tubman and her efforts from the mid-1800s through the Civil War to free slaves.

Tubman was born a slave and escaped to the north, where she became an abolitionist. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the northern states, she continued to return to the south and help other slaves escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad, a network of meeting places, secret routes, passageways and safe houses used to help slaves escape slave holding states in the south and flee to the northern states and Canada. Her efforts to help slaves earned her the nickname “Moses.”

During the Civil War, she worked as a nurse and a cook for the Union Army and later led the Combahee River Raid, an armed raid that freed more than 700 slaves in South Carolina.

“She had to be creative, she had to be bold and she had to be a smart lady,” Flaggs said. “ She risked her life, because back then if you got caught freeing a slave or educating a slave, that was a hanging offense.

“She had to be courageous bold and smart, and to get that award in her name is an honor I will never forget, and I credit it to my father, who couldn’t read or write, who always told me I could be anything I wanted to be if I just believed in God and believed in myself, and my mother, who told me that I should always trust in the Lord and there’s more honor to work than to steal.”

He said he never considered himself a trailblazer.

“I just wanted to make a difference. After having such a struggle growing up on knowing who I wanted to be, I finally decided I wanted to make a difference. I really wanted to be a lawyer, but I fell way short of that,” he said.

Flaggs credits the late James Winfield, a prominent African-American lawyer in Vicksburg, with the inspiration to enter politics and run for the House District 55 seat representing Warren County.

“James Winfield came to me in 1987 and asked me to run for the House,” he said. “I said I would if he and Bobby Doyle did not run. To have served 26 sessions in the Legislature and only missed one day and took thousands of votes, and then the people in your community elect you in a primary out of six people, it’s phenomenal, and he’s an awesome God. I give God all the credit for who I am and whatever I’ll be for the rest of my life.”

He said he made a promise to God that if he won the mayor’s election, he would serve as mayor “for all the right reasons. Dr. Martin Luther King said, ‘The time is always right to do what’s right.’”

“I’m passionate about Vicksburg,” he said. “I want to serve and never want to be served. I love Vicksburg, and I received this honor on behalf of my mother and father. I just wish they were here to witness that they were right and I was wrong coming up in life. And wish they would forgive me for all the trouble I caused them.”