OXFORD, Miss. — I’m a proud Mississippian, and our state’s poet laureate, but I don’t fly the state flag. Neither do my friends and neighbors, white or black (I’m white). The reason is simple: Mississippi, which has the country’s highest percentage of black residents, is the last state in the nation to have a flag that incorporates the Confederate symbol.
Few businesses or institutions, beyond the Capitol building, fly the state flag. The University of Mississippi, where I teach literature, took it down in 2015, after the Charleston church shooting. The Mississippi Business Journal pointed out that the flag also “negatively impacts outside investment.”
But the flag’s removal has only recently become a battle cry for Mississippians. In April, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, triggered anger and incredulity by declaring “Confederate Heritage Month.” After the death of George Floyd, the hashtag #TakeItDown has been trending on social media. A petition created five years ago to “remove the Confederate emblem from the Mississippi state flag” has begun recirculating, approaching its goal of 200,000 signatures by Sunday, Flag Day. Last Monday, bipartisan Mississippi lawmakers conducted a closed-door conversation to draft legislation to change the flag.
The momentum shows no sign of, well, flagging. And protests from black athletes will yield results — our leaders listen to football players more readily than literature professors. On May 29, Kenny Yeboah, a tight end recruit at the University of Mississippi, tweeted, “It’s crazy that as an African-American student-athlete I play for a team in a state that still has the Confederate flag incorporated into their flag.”
Even Governor Reeves won’t be able to dig in his good ole boy heels if football players threaten to walk.
But the flag’s removal introduces a new quandary: What comes after we #TakeItDown? Mississippi, with three million people, has the fourth-largest rural population in the country. For that population, particularly its older, white, non-college-educated adults, the Confederate flag represents “heritage,” not “racism,” according to a survey conducted by YouGov.com. These Mississippians will view the removal of the flag as a stripping of their heritage.
But what if there were a way to move forward without causing further alienation? What if we could create a new heritage?
Enter the Stennis flag, designed by a Mississippi artist named Laurin Stennis. Her grandfather, John C. Stennis, was a U.S. senator for 41 years, and a staunch segregationist. That the granddaughter of a racist politician is battling for a positive symbol for all citizens seems significant. White people must fix white people. That’s a lesson the Black Lives Matter protests made clear to those who didn’t already know it. The Stennis family, like all white Mississippi families, profited from privilege. But Ms. Stennis won’t profit from flag sales — our two new excellent museums, the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, receive the proceeds.
Capturing the flag is a high-stakes game. Failure means a doubling down on the current flag, as it did almost 20 years ago, when Mississippians rejected the proposed alternative, an unappealing circle of stars that was derided as the “pizza flag.” Governor Reeves likes to cite that referendum when letting new flag legislation die: “The people of Mississippi voted in 2001 to keep the current flag,” he’s stated more than once.
To create what’s now referred to as the “Stennis flag,” the artist married her training in woodblock printmaking with a study of flag design. She consulted with Ted Kaye, the author of “Good Flag, Bad Flag,” whose five principles of vexillology are: 1. Keep it simple. 2. Use meaningful symbolism. 3. Use two or three basic colors. 4. No lettering or seals. 5. Be distinctive or be related. Ms. Stennis’s design features a big blue star surrounded by 19 small stars on a white background, with red bars on either end. Its symbols draw from Mississippi history, as detailed on the Stennis Flag website. The central star, for example, represents Mississippi as the 20th state to join the nation.
The Stennis flag succeeds on design principles. But can it succeed in uniting Mississippi?
As the poet laureate of this troubled, contentious state, I should have a handle on symbolism. Yet I’m unsure how heritage is created from scratch, how flapping nylon can be invested with resonance. Nevertheless, I fly the Stennis flag in order to normalize it. To my three children, it’s worked. It’s the only Mississippi flag they’ve ever known. But what about the rest of Mississippi’s children?
Every day, there are fewer Mississippians for whom the flag symbolizes heritage, and more for whom it symbolizes the heritage of racial terror. Flag Day has come, Governor Reeves. Let us send this new banner up our empty poles. Stop battling the winds of change.
Beth Ann Fennelly is the author, most recently, of “Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs.”
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