“It is a symbol that increasingly represents a day in the past that we do not want to celebrate,” Senator Roger Wicker said of the Confederation battle flag. He added that NASCAR’s move to ban flags at its events helped push the state to remove the Confederate battle cross from its flag, which has stood for more than a century.
A sizable number of Republicans support a plan in the Senate to remove the names of Confederate leaders from military property, even as Trump has promised to veto a major defense bill if it includes a provision calling for the removal of names within three years. And on Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany did not say whether Trump denounced the flight of the Confederate flag.
Wicker, 69, who has held his seat in the Senate since 2007 and whose great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy, is not new to the flag issue. In 2015, a week after a white supremacist murdered nine people at an African-American church in Charleston, Wicker said he “shook and turned” one night and then wrote a statement publicly announcing his support for changing his state’s flag, saying that it should be removed and stored in a museum, while requesting a more “unifying” flag.
“As a descendant of several brave Americans who fought for the Confederacy, I have not seen the current Mississippi state flag as offensive,” Wicker said in his 2015 statement. “However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that many of my Citizens feel differently and that our state flag increasingly portrays a false impression of our state before others. “
“Oh yes,” Wicker said Monday when asked if he received a rejection at the time, saying voters told him, “That is our heritage.”
“It was risky for someone planning to run for reelection … I would say that most of my constituents were not responsive at the time.”
The problem languished for the most part in the Mississippi Legislature after Wicker’s announcement, but picked up after the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis police custody. A wave of calls to change the flag, from church leaders, the NCAA, sports figures and lawmakers from both parties, prompted the Republican-dominated Legislature to pass the measure and Mississippi Republican Party Governor Tate Reeves To sign it, removing an emblem that had lasted more than a century and survived a 2001 voter referendum.
However, Wicker’s opinion on whether to rename military bases to Confederate names is more nuanced, saying in the interview that “we should be grateful” to soldiers like his great-great-grandfather who signed an oath of allegiance to the union after the war. above.
“The flag is one thing because it really should be a symbol of unity for a state or a country,” said Wicker. “But the total name change is completely different.”
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