“I think college students react a lot emotionally”, Bryant said.
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“There was a time where we were not wanted at this University”.
But the student body on October 20 voted to take down the flag, 33 to 15 with one abstention, according to a University of Mississippi press release. Major corporations including Apple, Walmart, Amazon, Sears and eBay all stopped selling products with Confederate imagery on them as well as the flags themselves. Mississippi’s state flag was adopted in 1894.
Earlier this year, South Carolina’s capitol building removed the Confederate flag from its grounds. “We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi’s flag”.
In this June 23, 2015, file photograph, the state flag of Mississippi is unfurled against the front of the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Miss.
He is proud that his school has sent the message that it wants to “distance itself from Confederate iconography in general”, and while it certainly doesn’t mean the end of racism, it’s another step in taking down the structures that support racism, he said.
For decades, the school has been at the heart of the clash between modern civil rights and the South’s relentless grip on Confederate nostalgia.
First it was the flagsticks, banned twenty years ago.
Athletic director Ross Bjork, who has said the flag makes recruiting more hard, was part of a leadership team that met with the interim chancellor over the weekend and praised his decision to remove it.
The speaker of the House has called for change, but his fellow Republican, Gov. Phil Bryant, declined to call a special legislative session to debate it, saying Mississippians themselves should to decide the flag’s future. A statewide vote in 2001 made a decision to keep the Confederate emblem on the flag.
Members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation spoke out against the flag following the Charleston shootings. He said that the issue about the Confederate emblem was neither a black nor a white issue but a human issue.
But as my colleague Tyler Bishop pointed out last week, the most common defense of the Confederate flag-that it’s about “heritage, not hate”-doesnpt “recognize all the rich and varied aspects of Southern heritage that the flag fails to represent”.
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But not everyone agreed with the motion and many supporters of the flag urged the students to protect it.
