JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi’s attorney general said Wednesday that he will defend his state’s flag against a lawsuit that seeks to remove its Confederate battle emblem, even though he thinks the flag hurts the state and should change.
Jim Hood, the only Democrat still holding statewide office in Mississippi, said his opinion about state laws won’t prevent him from fulfilling his oath to defend them.
“I think the Legislature should take the ball and change the flag,” Hood said at the state Capitol. “It has an impact on us economically and the spirit of our state, our people. It’s time to make a change in the flag.”
Carlos Moore, an attorney from Grenada, Miss., filed a federal lawsuit Monday that said the Confederate X on the flag puts him and other African-Americans in danger. He cited the slayings of nine black worshippers at a church in June in Charleston, S.C. The white suspect in that case had previously posed for photos with a rebel flag.
The attack in Charleston sparked widespread debate over the public display of Confederate symbols across the South.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, called Moore’s lawsuit “frivolous” and said voters should decide whether to redesign the state flag that has flown since 1894. In a statewide election in 2001, Mississippi voters decided by a 2-to-1 margin to keep the flag that has the rebel emblem. The state’s population is almost 38 percent black.
Hood said that in defending the Mississippi flag in court, he will rely on a ruling from a similar case filed in the mid-1990s in Georgia. A black resident of Atlanta sued over the design of Georgia’s flag, which then displayed the same Confederate battle emblem that’s still on the Mississippi banner.
The Georgia lawsuit argued the flag was racist because the Confederate emblem was added in 1956 to defy school desegregation rulings. U.S. District Judge Orinda D. Evans ruled in January 1996 that she would not make Georgia stop flying its flag because: “There simply is no evidence in the record indicating that the flag itself results in discrimination against African-Americans.”
