This archive report was first published on 4 July 2020.
On July 4, 2020, the state of Mississippi made a historic decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from its state flag. This move is a significant step towards ending the implicit message of white supremacy that has been perpetuated for far too long.
The flag, which had been a part of the state's emblem since 1894, was a symbol of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. It was a reminder to Black Americans that their lives mattered less than those of whites. The flag's presence was a constant reminder of the systemic racism that has plagued the United States since its inception.
My mother, who grew up in the South, would often sing to me the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' as we drove past the state flag. She sang it to counteract the symbolic violence of the flag and to remind me of the struggle for justice. She knew that the flag's presence was a reminder that Black lives did not matter as much as white lives.
George Orwell once wrote, 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.' The story of reunion and reconciliation between the North and the South after the Civil War wrote Black Americans out of the story, and monuments to the Confederacy, like Mississippi's flag, helped to inscribe both a figurative and literal white supremacy onto the physical landscape and the psychic landscape of the American imagination.
The removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Mississippi state flag is a significant step towards ending the implicit message of white supremacy. It is a reminder that the power to erect and maintain such symbols is shifting, and that getting rid of the power of such symbols to visit a figurative violence upon African-Americans is a step towards ending the literal manifestations of institutionalized white supremacy.
