Photo from Department of Motor Vehicles/Handout via ReutersĤ.
The design of a proposed “Sons of the Confederacy” Texas state license plate is shown in this handout illustration provided by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles March 20, 2015. The flag has also been used by the Ku Klux Klan, though it is not the Klan’s official flag. In the years that followed, the battle flag became an important part of segregationist symbolism, and was featured prominently on the 1956 redesign of Georgia’s state flag, a legislative decision that was likely at least partly a response to the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate school two years earlier. In 1948, the newly-formed segregationist Dixiecrat party adopted the flag as a symbol of resistance to the federal government. The flag took on new associations in the 1940s, when it began to appear more frequently in contexts unrelated to the Civil War, such as University of Mississippi football games. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the battle flag was used mostly at veterans’ events and to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. The flag began to take on a new significance in the 20th century. Photo by Patrick Murphy-Racey/Sports Illustrated/Getty Imagesģ. Mississippi fans in stands with Confederate flags during a sporting event in 1993. The poll also showed that African-Americans, Democrats and the highly educated were more likely to perceive the flag negatively. The same study showed that 30 percent of Americans reported a negative reaction to seeing the flag on display.īut the majority, 58 percent, reported feeling neither positive nor negative. Roughly one in ten Americans feels positively when they see the Confederate flag displayed, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center poll. The flag is divisive, but most Americans may not care.
It only came to be the flag most prominently associated with the Confederacy after the South lost the war.Ģ. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.ĭesigned by the Confederate politician William Porcher Miles, the flag was rejected for use as the Confederacy’s official emblem, although it was incorporated into the two later flags as a canton. Instead, the flag that most people associate with the Confederacy was the battle flag of Gen. The Confederate States of America went through three different flags during the Civil War, but the battle flag wasn’t one of them. The Confederate battle flag was never the official flag of the Confederacy.
The flag has become the subject of controversy following Wednesday’s racially-motivated mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.
Here are eight things you may not have known about this contentious Confederate emblem.Ī Confederate flag is seen during a party to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Santa Barbara D’Oeste, Brazil, April 26, 2015. On Saturday, former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney took to Twitter to call for the flag’s removal from the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, and over 400,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the government of South Carolina remove the flag from “all government places.” Remove it now to honor #Charleston victims. To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred. Take down the #ConfederateFlag at the SC Capitol.
She is expected to address the Confederate flag controversy.įollowing the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday in which a gunman shot and killed nine people attending bible study at a historic black church, the Confederate battle flag - also called the rebel flag, the southern cross and the Dixie flag - has been the subject of contentious debate.