On Sunday, Gov. Nathan Deal’s top spokesman posted the following on his Twitter account: “Attn CEOs looking in South: There’s no Confederate flag debate in #GA.”
This is mostly true, save perhaps for that small 2014 kerfuffle over a specialty license plate design submitted by the Georgia chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The state Department of Revenue approved it.
(Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state of Texas’ right to refuse to authorize such a plate.)
But in 2001, Georgia removed the Confederate battle emblem that had dominated the state flag since 1956. The symbol was adopted as a protest of the U.S. Supreme Court’s declaration, made two years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation was unconstitutional.
The year 1956 also featured a presidential election. The new Georgia flag was adopted in time to be waved on the floor of the Democratic National Convention.
Gov. Zell Miller made the first attempt to remove the Confederate battle emblem in 1993. It failed, and Miller nearly lost his bid for re-election the next year.
The second, successful effort came eight years later. It cost Gov. Roy Barnes his re-election bid, fractured the state Democratic Party and ultimately allowed the Georgia GOP to seize control of the state. (Barnes also had trouble with teachers and northern exurbanites opposed to a thruway linking I-75 and I-85.)
The replacement flag had a blue field that incorporated small versions of past Georgia flags, including the ‘56 flag. Its aesthetics were criticized. People said it resembled a Denny’s place mat.
During his campaign, Sonny Perdue, the first Republican governor in modern Georgia history, promised a statewide referendum on the 1956 Georgia flag — with its Confederate symbolism.
Democrats in the Legislature, with the help of Republicans — and some quiet plotting by former President Jimmy Carter — subverted Perdue’s promise. Instead, the Legislature approved a new Georgia flag, a modified version of the Stars-and-Bars state flag that flew before 1956.
That flag, which still waves today, has its own Confederate roots. The Stars and Bars was the first national flag of the Confederacy. But it never became associated with the South’s 20th century fight to preserve segregation.
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