JACKSON, Miss. ― The University of Mississippi quietly removed the state flag with its Confederate battle emblem from its place of honor on campus Monday morning after students and faculty called it a divisive symbol that undermines efforts to promote diversity, tolerance and respect.
Interim Chancellor Morris Stocks waited until after the brief ceremony was over to announce that he had ordered the flag lowered and sent to the university’s archives.
The action came days after the student senate, the faculty senate and other groups adopted a student-led resolution calling for removal of the banner from the Oxford campus, a bastion for Southern elites since its founding in 1848.
“As Mississippi’s flagship university, we have a deep love and respect for our state,” Stocks said in a statement Monday. “Because the flag remains Mississippi’s official banner, this was a hard decision. I understand the flag represents tradition and honor to some. But to others, the flag means that some members of the Ole Miss family are not welcomed or valued.”
Without fanfare and with no advance public notice, university police officers removed the banner early Monday from a flagpole that stands among oak trees in the Lyceum circle, between the white-columned main administration building and a marble statue of a saluting Confederate soldier. It’s the same area where deadly White riots broke out in 1962, when James Meredith was enrolled as the first Black student at Ole Miss, under a federal court order and with protection from a phalanx of U.S. marshals.
Today’s students forced this issue at the height of Mississippi’s campaign season, as the governor and most state lawmakers seek re-election on Nov. 3, and many of these politicians have been loath to stake their own positions.
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.
