By Emily Wagster Pettus

The Associated Press

Mississippi lawmakers voted June 28 to surrender the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag more than a century after white supremacist legislators adopted the design a generation after the South lost the Civil War.

Mississippi has a 38 percent Black population — and the last state flag that incorporates the emblem that’s widely seen as racist.

Religious groups — including the large and influential Mississippi Baptist Convention — said erasing the rebel emblem from the state flag is a moral imperative.

Many people who wanted to keep the emblem on the Mississippi flag said they see it as a symbol of heritage.

Legislators put the Confederate emblem on the upper left corner of Mississippi flag in 1894, as Whites were squelching political power that African Americans gained after the Civil War.