While we were all busy celebrating Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ victory on Saturday, something uplifting happened on the gridiron at Mississippi State that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Last Tuesday, just over 70 percent of Mississippi voters approved a new state flag to replace the old flag with its Confederate iconography.
Of course, racism still permeates the state which Donald Trump carried with 60 percent of the vote. The Senate race was slightly closer with the openly racist incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith topping Democrat Mike Espy by a 56 percent to 42 percent margin.
But at least there was a positive change to celebrate last Saturday when Mississippi State defensive lineman Kobe Jones proudly ran out on to the field carrying the state’s new Magnolia flag before the game with Vanderbilt.
After the game in which Mississippi St. beat Vanderbilt 24-17, Jones said, "I was very proud to finally get to wave a flag that unites all Mississippians That was a huge moment for me and the whole state," according to the Clarion Ledger newspaper.
At Ole Miss, here was the reaction of players when they received the new state flag on Monday from the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives Philip Gunn, a white Republican who had actually fought for years to change the state’s flag.
The players will have to wait until Saturday’s game against South Carolina to take the field with the new flag.
That’s quite a change for Ole Miss which in 1972 became the last member of the SEC to field a team with a black player on its roster. And it wasn’t until 2010 that Ole Miss finally replaced its racist mascot, Colonel Reb, with a new mascot, the Black Bear.
Black student-athletes played a big role in the movement to change the state flag this year. Mississippi was the last state to still feature the Confederate battle flag on its state banner, even though it has a larger proportion of black residents — nearly 40 percent — than any other state.
For years, there had been a battle in Mississippi to remove the Confederate symbol from the 126-year-old state flag. The NCAA and SEC had put pressure on the state by prohibiting postseason events in Mississippi until the flag was replaced. Mississippi's public universities repeatedly condemned the flag.
And then Mississippi State’s star running back Kylin Hill, a Mississippi native, replied to a Tweet by Gov. Tate Reeves on June 22 that set off a firestorm.
Hill received an outpouring of hate messages on social media, and someone called his mother and repeatedly said the N-word. But Hill received support from his teammates, as well as his head coach Mike Leach and the university’s athletic director John Cohen.
A few days later, 46 coaches from eight universities came to the state capitol to support replacing the flag. On June 28, the state legislature voted to remove the old state flag and set up a commission to design a new one.
Last Tuesday, voters approved the new flag which has the phrase “In God We Trust” and 20 stars (Mississippi was the 20th state) encircling a magnolia blossom on a dark blue background with red and yellow bars on the ends.
And God looked down with approval, or I should say Morgan Freeman, a Mississippi native who portrayed God in the film “Bruce Almighty.”
Unfortunately no one will be carrying the flag onto the field next Saturday for Mississippi State. The Bulldogs game against Auburn had to be cancelled because positive tests for the coronavirus and subsequent quarantining of individuals within the school’s football program left it without the minimum number of scholarship student-athletes required to take the field under SEC regulations.
It’s the latest coronavirus outbreak in the SEC whose fall football schedule has been ravaged by suspended games as the pandemic spirals out of control across the country due to Trump’s malfeasance.
In case you’re wondering why there’s no mention of carrying the new flag at Mississippi’s HBCU football powerhouse Jackson St., with its new coach NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, that’s because in July the Southwestern Athletic Conference of HBCUs postponed all fall sports programs until 2021 due to the pandemic.