I am a full-blooded Mississippian — well, half. My father is a Georgian — he moved here with my mother years before I was born. After my 21 years of residency, I am fully acclimated into Mississippi culture. My Georgia blood stands no match for the passion I have learned for this state: the food, the rolling hills and deep woods, the music.
I was still young when I first realized what a treat it was to come from the land of the Blues, the birthplace of America’s music. This realization was not a slow one.
With no subtlety, I one day understood how I had been blessed.
I figured I had something that everyone in the country wanted. Every non-Mississippian must crave this sense of origin that is my birthright. However, as quick as this consciousness of culture was sprung upon me, another understanding of my state’s past was slowly developing, my elders strategically feeding it to me in manageable doses.
In middle school I learned about Mississippi’s past of segregation. It seemed so distant to me. It was so long ago. Sure, I believe you that it happened, but how real could it really have been? I was in denial that my home place, the birthplace of America’s music, was the perpetrator of this vehement hatred that Mrs. Ford was telling me about in my seventh grade humanities class. Slowly, with images of blacks hanging from trees as whites of all ages posed for photographs with Rebel flags, and of protesters being ripped from the ground succumbing to the power of fire hoses, I accepted our past. For the first time, I was ashamed of my Mississippi.
It was then that the sight of Mississippi’s flag was first met with discomfort and confusion.
Unfortunately, there were few circles where I could voice this concern. “It’s our heritage,” they would say.
“You cannot ignore the past,” they would say. This yearning for a new face lay dormant. I felt as though I must somehow be wrong, that I was missing a part of the puzzle. That even though it represented senseless oppression and dreadful violence in the past, its use in the present was only a romanticized remembrance of former splendor and was associated with racism by no one.
There was a time when racism was uniformly a Southern movement. Mississippi, like no other state, has fought change. Our flag manifests that resistance. It has damaged our reputation and it has hindered our progress. The Mississippi state flag lets the nation know that racial tension blooms still in Mississippi. It sends the message that ignorance is persistent and has a way of exceeding generational lines.
We have not reached a point as a society where something with such heavy connotation as the Confederate Battle Flag can be used to unanimously and harmlessly represent my Mississippi. I believe we will never reach that stage.
The Confederate Battle Flag does not represent me as a Mississippian, and I have never suffered at the hands of its wavers. It is a preposterously false understanding of the current state of our state to claim that the flag does not offend many of the citizens that it is supposed to represent. It is one thing for an individual or private establishment to wave the flag. That is their right, protected by the First Amendment. It is another thing completely for a government to risk endorsing the message that is so generally associated with the symbol.
Have the flag in museums. Have the flag in history books. Talk about it, and educate on it. This is remembrance.
But having it as the symbol for our state is not only honoring it, it is a conscious decision to let it represent us in the present. Do not remove it from history, because it is a part of history. Remove it from the present, because it is not a part of the present.
Let us rejoice in our state’s contribution to American culture. All of America mourned the loss of B.B. King, and every American understands what Elvis gave the world.
I refuse to stand idly by as such a shameful piece of Mississippi’s vibrant past and bold culture overshadows our accomplishments as it flies over our capital and before the rest of the country. Let us show the nation that our government does not favor one demographic over another and that our state is a place where all peoples can feel proud of the flag over their heads. Let the rest of the nation hear our great music. Don’t let stubbornness and pettiness drown out our song. The world is listening.
Reid Haynie is a senior history and political science major from Jackson.
