The Mississippi state flag won’t be flying at the New Jersey Liberty State Park overlooking the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island anymore. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy ordered it removed Friday and replaced with a U.S. flag. Flags from every state fly from poles along Freedom Way, which runs through the park.
Mississippi’s is the state flag with the most obvious echo of the Civil War. Its upper left corner is a square version of the Rebel battle flag that most Americans view as the Confederate flag. The flag also includes a red, white, and blue bar just like the first official Confederate flag known as the “Stars and Bars.”
According to the governor’s official website:
“New Jersey’s strength is rooted in our diverse communities,” said Governor Phil Murphy. “The Confederate symbol displayed on the Mississippi state flag is reprehensible and does not reflect our values of inclusivity and equality. I applaud Senator Cunningham for bringing this issue in her district to my attention.”
“The Confederate flag symbolizes an era of hate, violence, and division,” said Sen. Sandra Cunningham. “I thank Governor Murphy for his commitment to tolerance and equality and for the decision to remove this hateful symbol from Liberty State Park. Hate has no home in New Jersey.”
In a statement, Phil Bryant, Mississippi’s Republican governor, said: “I’m disappointed in Gov. Murphy’s actions. As I have repeatedly said, the voters of Mississippi should decide what the state flag is or is not.”
The Confederate emblem has been part of Mississippi’s state flag since 1894, as white supremacist Jim Crow laws took hold in the state and across much of the South. Along with a resurrected Ku Klux Klan, the battle flag became quite popular after D.W. Griffith’s Birth of Nation film celebrating a mythologized Klan appeared in 1915. In the 1950s, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that racially segregated schools are unconstitutional, the flying of the battle flag became far more common than it had been, and merchants cashed in with bumperstickers, tee-shirts, belt buckles and decals sporting this emblem of slavery and white supremacy, which appears far more widely today than just in the states of the Old Confederacy.
In Georgia, in 1956, lawmakers added the Rebel emblem to their state’s flag as an intentional nose-thumbing to Brown. It remained on the flag until 2001. Mississippians went to the polls that same year to vote in a non-binding referendum on whether to adopt a new flag. The vote was 64% to 36% to retain the 1894 flag. Not coincidentally, the state’s population at the time was 63% white and 37% black. Several Mississippi city and county governments and public universities have stopped flying the flag.