Politics

At the time, the state senator falsely claimed that an “African American Confederate soldier” had designed the flag. “I can only imagine how proud he was that his art, his flag design was chosen to represent our State and now we want to strip him of his pride, his hard work. I’m sure he put a lot of thought into this design,” Chism wrote in a June 2020 Facebook post.

In fact, a white supremacist lawmaker, Sen. Edward N. Scudder of Issaquena County, designed the 1894 flag. In a 1924 speech to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, his daughter Fayssoux Scudder Corneil explained his motives for designing the flag: “My father loved the memory of the valor and courage of those brave men who wore the gray … and has always taken keen interest in the reunions where he could meet and mingle with those of the Lost Cause. He told me that it was a simple matter for him to design the flag because he wanted to perpetuate in a legal and lasting way that dear battle flag under which so many of our people had so gloriously fought.”

Mississippi entered the Civil War in an effort to protect the institution of slavery, as the the state’s Declaration of Secession explains. Chism’s county, Union County, was formed in 1870—the same year Mississippi was readmitted to the Union.

JFC