GOP lawmaker calls for return of Mississippi’s Confederate-themed state flag: report

A Mississippi Republican lawmaker is calling for the return of the state’s retired Confederate-themed flag, The Mississippi Free Press reports.

State Sen. Kathy Chism issued the call to bring back the flag during a June 3 speech at a Tishomingo County political rally.

“That flag, a lot of our people fought and died under that flag,” Chism said, according to the report.

Both houses in 2020 voted decisively in favor of retiring the flag, which features red, white, and blue bars with a Confederate cross in the upper left corner. It was originally adopted as the state flag in 1894.

The flag’s retirement vote following decades of activism.

Chism was among 14 senators (all Republicans) from a body of 52 members who voted against the June 28, 2020 measure to change the flag.

The Mississippi Legislature’s Republican leaders finally agreed to vote on legislation to change the state flag on June 28, 2020.

Chism in a 2020 Facebook post falsely stated that the Confederate-themed flag had been designed by an African American soldier who served for the Confederacy.

“I can only imagine how proud he was that his art, his flag design was chosen to represent our State and now we want to strip him of his pride, his hard work. I’m sure he put a lot of thought into this design,” Chism’s June 2020 Facebook post said.

The Confederate-themed flag was designed by Sen. Edward N. Scudder, a white supremacist, according to the report, which notes that his daughter Fayssoux Scudder Corneil spoke about what compelled her father to design the flag during a 1924 speech to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

“My father loved the memory of the valor and courage of those brave men who wore the gray … and has always taken keen interest in the reunions where he could meet and mingle with those of the Lost Cause,” Corneil said, according to the report.

“He told me that it was a simple matter for him to design the flag because he wanted to perpetuate in a legal and lasting way that dear battle flag under which so many of our people had so gloriously fought.”

Gov. Tate Reeves signed the measure to retire the Confederate-themed flag into law despite his previous opposition to changing it, and he created a commission that designed a new state flag with a Magnolia at its center, the report said.

The new design got overwhelming support from voters who backed it by a 73 percent to 27 percent margin in November 2020, according to the report, which notes that a similar measure 19 years earlier lost by a 64 percent to 36 percent margin.

Read the full article here.