State Flag of Georgia: 1956 Change Historical Context [2000 pub]

Georgia State Senate Research Staff document research paper ^ | 2000 | Georgia State Senate Research Staff

[mbarker12474]

Quote:

"In early 1955, John Sammons Bell, chairman of the State Democratic Party and attorney for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG) suggested a new state flag for Georgia that would incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag. At the 1956 session of the General Assembly, state senators Jefferson Lee Davis and Willis Harden introduced Senate Bill 98 to change the state flag. Signed into law on February 13, 1956, the bill became effective the following July 1."

Another:

In 1948, the battle flag began to take on a different meaning when it appeared at the Dixiecrat convention in Birmingham as a symbol of southern protest and resistance to the federal government – displaying the flag then acquired a more political significance after this convention. Georgia of course, changed its flag in 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. In 1961, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, raised the Confederate battle flag over the capitol dome in Montgomery to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. The next year, South Carolina raised the battle flag over its capitol. In 1963, as part of his continued opposition to integration, Governor Wallace again raised the flag over the capitol dome. Despite the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War, the likely meaning of the battle flag by that time was not the representation of the Confederacy, because the flag had already been used by Dixiecrats and had become recognized as a symbol of protest and resistance. Based on its association with the Dixiecrats, it was at least in part, if not entirely, a symbol of resistance to federally enforced integration. ...

[mbarker12474]

fwiw

PDF document at link

Document has background information re George state flag with Confederate flag symbol. See also Mississippi and South Carolina flag history and association with, or not with, 1950's and 1960's racial politics.

[AnAmericanMother]

This Senate "research paper" was a setup by Dem gov. Roy Barnes to support his midnight stealth changing of the flag. It didn't work out too well for him - he was defeated for re-election. He was a scorched earth kinda guy and didn't care who he defamed or who he stepped on to get what he wanted. He gerrymandered our neighborhood (and others in his home county) because we did not vote for him in his first election.

My family knew almost everyone involved in the 50s and the 00s (including Cecil Alexander, an architect whose design of the Barnes "flag" was not his finest hour). John Bell was an appeals court judge, a big Civil War buff and a friend of my dad's. My dad marched at Selma, he wouldn't have hung around with a "seg". The change in the flag was proposed for the Civil War Centennial, which Bell was heavily into. Some of the usual noisy rabble-rousers in the General Assembly tried to make a racial issue out of it, but they were always there making a stink. And some of them (e.g. Lester Maddox) sounded like hard-line racists but actually weren't.

This whole Flag Flap is so engineered and so dishonest that it makes me want to go out and buy a whole bunch of Battle Flags of the Army of Northern Virginia - even though all my ancestors were in the Army of Tennessee.