2015/07/09 –

Mississippi political leaders have refused to stand up for progress and remove a divisive symbol of oppression from the state’s flag.  It falls now upon the business community to help pull our state into the modern world.

The Confederate “stars and bars” emblem in our current flag was first adopted as the battle flag for Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, during Lee’s fight to keep the enslavement of human beings legal in the United States.  Decades after the Confederate army lost the Civil War through economic collapse, disease, desertion and battle, the symbol became a source of “Southern pride” and a celebration of a barbaric pro-slavery economy that has poisoned our American society from its beginning.

Rather than distancing themselves from a segregationist cause and a traitorous act of war, arrogant Confederate veterans and their sympathizers immediately set upon and abolished any post-war effort to bring liberty and equality to the South, making race-based terrorism, political oppression and recurrent lynching a Southern way of life for more than a century.  These same white terrorists and their apologists adopted Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia flag as their emblem.  Segregationist whites holding political power moved to incorporate the Confederate battle emblem into the Mississippi state flag in 1894.

Since then, Southern political leaders have energized their racist base by making the flag a symbol of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, or “Dixiecrats,” which formed in 1948 to oppose civil rights platforms championed by the more inclusive national Democratic Party.

Today the flag remains the signature emblem of white supremacist groups and political parties pushing a segregationist or apartheid agenda.  The now infamous Charleston shooter, Dylann Storm Roof, held the flag in a widely circulated photograph in the months leading up to his deadly rampage, prompting many political figures to publicly disown the emblem and its evil significance — but not Mississippi leaders.

While the MSNAACP recognizes the value of knowing our history, there is a difference between honoring an ugly history and identifying with it.  You honor and remember your history when you view a divisive, segregationist emblem, like a Nazi Swastika, in a museum.  It means something else entirely when you fly a Nazi Swastika over your courthouse.

A symbol such as the Confederate battle flag, which has been so over-utilized by the forces of murderous oppression, should not be the official banner representing a civilized society.  For this reason, we call upon the sensible, pragmatic wisdom of local industry and industry leaders to help Mississippi politicians wash away the persistent stain that this state has carried all the way into the modern world.

Mississippi remains the last state in this great land to identify itself with an outmoded symbol of a brutal regime founded upon violence and rape.  Slavery is an institution that should have died out with the Roman Empire, yet images of it exist in American black and white photographs, and we still carry the scars in our national conscience.  Elements of it still echo in our lopsided economy, where race can easily determine your tax bracket — and, sadly, we can look up and still see it in our flag.

Our leaders are centuries late in removing the filth of a broken, wicked past, so it falls to modern industry and those who stand to benefit from a new, inclusive Mississippi, to call out those who damage the Mississippi brand.  Our state, which traditionally ranks at the bottom of most charts except teen pregnancy and diabetes, inevitably stands to benefit from this long-overdue makeover.  No longer can we sit idle and awkwardly avert our gaze as our leaders wallow on the putrid corpse of segregation.

The MSNAACP calls on associations such as the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, local chambers of commerce — and particularly the state’s Chamber of Commerce, the Mississippi Economic Council — the Mississippi Community College Board and all institutions of higher learning, as well as the Mississippi Agricultural Industry Council, to join with newspaper, radio and television outlets to help galvanize the hearts of our state political leaders in favor of a newer, better, and modern Mississippi.

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Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.  For more information about the Mississippi NAACP or news stories, call 601-353-8452 or log on to www.naacpms.org.  Like us on Facebook by searching Mississippi NAACP and follow us on Twitter @MSNAACP.

Source: NAACP Writers