JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves will sign a bill Tuesday evening to retire the last state flag in the U.S. that includes the Confederate battle emblem.
Mississippi has come under increasing pressure to change its flag since protests against racial injustice have focused attention on Confederate symbols.
White supremacist legislators put the Confederate battle emblem, with its red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars, on the upper-left corner of the Mississippi flag in 1894, as white people were squelching the fragile political power African Americans had gained after the Civil War.
After a white gunman who posed with the Confederate flag killed Black worshipers at a South Carolina church in 2015, Mississippi’s Republican speaker of the House, Philip Gunn, said his religious faith compelled him to say that Mississippi must purge the symbol from its flag.
Reeves has repeatedly refused to say whether he thinks the Confederate-themed flag properly represents present-day Mississippi, sticking to a position he ran on last year, when he promised people that if the flag design was going to be reconsidered, it would be done in another statewide election.
