Originally Posted by
MagicDawg
I grew up in Brandon and went to State, but moved to Atlanta after college. I've watched this whole flag thing before, 20 years ago.
Georgia had a big battle emblem -- bigger than MS -- and eventually it got removed by democrat governor Roy Barnes who replaced it with what looked like a bad PowerPoint slide that threw up. Everyone hated it. Sonny Perdue, the first Republican governor of Georgia since Reconstruction, ran on changing it and promised a referendum. When the referendum came, the old flag wasn't part of the selections. The referendum was on the Barnes PowerPoint disaster and the Perdue stars-and-bars flag that he got passed. (It is actually based on the official Confederate national flag, which is the biggest irony of all.)
There was a period of a few years where the old flag was flown rather widely among the "resistance." They still hate Perdue for depriving them of that battle emblem. You can find specialty license plates and you'll still see that flag flown at the odd house in the country that also has a flagpole devoted to the battle flag itself -- the whole giant Ole-Miss-like full rectangle. But outside of the random racist and/or old south devotee who has embraced that identity, though, the only place you really see it now is over a Confederate cemetery or engraved on a monument at some battleground historical marker.
I expect there will be a resistance element in MS that more deeply embraces the 1894 flag as a result, but that will fade over time. It's not even as prevalent at OM as it used to be.