Vote on Flag Likely to Win One for Dixie

If loyalty to the Confederate cause could be measured in mosquito bites, Terry Rainey deserves a monument.

The 39-year-old construction worker walked 43 days and 43 nights from the swamps of the Gulf of Mexico to the steps of the state Capitol carrying a Rebel flag. Today, he’ll vote to keep the divisive symbol flying.

“For my granddaddies,” Rainey said. And then he blurted: “God save the South!”

Today, for the first time, one of the most emotional topics in this region will be decided by the people. In an unusual referendum, Mississippi residents will be asked to choose between a new state flag without the Confederate battle emblem and the old one with it.

According to several polls, the people are going to vote for the old flag. Overwhelmingly.

There’s been an intense struggle to head this off, with NAACP volunteers banging on doors, business leaders taping radio ads and the state’s few progressive politicians stumping one last time in muggy community halls for people to “do the right thing.”

But unless there’s an upset, Mississippi isn’t expected to go the way of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina or Alabama--places where artful compromises concerning the Confederate flag put the issue to rest. Instead, Mississippi will likely remain the lone state still flying the bold “X” of the Confederacy.

The referendum has lifted the lid on deep-seated feelings and energized legions of Civil War reenactors, poor farmers, graying Klansmen and many young people such as the knobby-kneed girl blasting “Dixie” on her accordion at a rally Saturday as Rainey trudged up the Capitol steps.

Some are driven by a profound attachment to their heritage. Some are downright racist.

Mississippi always has been the deepest of the Deep South--the poorest, the least educated, the least urban and the most obsessed with the past.

As the state’s favorite native son, William Faulkner, once put it: In Mississippi “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

For the few tourists who drive across the bone-rattling roads to see the sights, the welcome is warm and buttery. Walk into the Cavalier Shoppe, a memorabilia store in Bruce, and the owner will stick a frosty Coke in your hand before the door slams behind you. Sit down for a beer at Murff’s in Oxford and if the waitress hears you’re from out of town, she won’t let you pay.

Underneath the storied hospitality, however, is a stubborn pride in the way things were. It’s not something people sit around talking about. It’s in their blood, almost like an ethnicity.

“History is very personal here,” said Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. “Many people have families that go back to the Civil War. And when they think of the flag, they think of specific ancestors who died fighting under it. To change the flag is to dishonor their families.”

The state also has slipped the furthest since the Civil War. That may seem like a long time ago. But Mississippians are especially nostalgic for reminders of the days when their state was home to more millionaires than anywhere except New York--its wealth measured in cotton and, of course, slaves.

Today, it is the poorest in the union, with a per capita income of $20,688.

That has affected the flag debate too.

In South Carolina and Georgia, the threat of boycotts helped pressure politicians to take down the Confederate flag. But there’s not much to boycott here. Sleepy Jackson, the state’s biggest city at a population of 197,000, is not a convention and business hub like Atlanta. The brackish Gulf Coast, dotted with tar-paper shacks and rusting shrimp boats, is no Hilton Head, S.C.

“We’ve tried to make this an issue about people’s wallets, but it hasn’t really worked,” said George Shelton, executive director of the Mississippi Legacy Fund, the business-oriented group pushing to change the flag.

Thanks to riverboat casinos and a Nissan plant that will open soon, the state’s economy has grown rapidly during the last decade. But industry captains fear that a victory for the old flag will renew the perception of Mississippi as a place that time forgot and will scare away future business.

According to a poll conducted March 21 by Associated Press, 67% of Mississippi’s 2.8 million residents don’t want to remove the St. Andrews cross from the state flag, which dates to 1894. The proposed new banner is the same design of red, white and blue bars, except the cross in the upper left corner has been replaced with a circle of 20 stars (to represent the 20th state). Although it’s not purely a race issue, 80% of whites are against the new flag and 60% of blacks support it.

“When I look at that thing,” said Deborah Denard, an official with the Mississippi National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, “I see slavery, I see lynchings, I see treason.”

“I see honor, I see ancestors, I see extraordinary bravery against superior forces,” said Jim Giles, founder of Southern Initiative, a Mississippi heritage group.

Predictably, the issue has brought out the extremes. A handful of Ku Klux Klan members came to Saturday’s rally in Jackson to stand in the rain and wave their flags.

“Yep, I’m in the Klan,” said Aubrey Bates, a 69-year-old Mississippi native. “But we’re not racist anymore. We just want the whites to stay in their position and the blacks in theirs. That’s all. And we don’t want the flag messed with.”

Many blacks and others offended by the Confederate cross don’t seem as passionate about the issue. Black voter turnout is not expected to be high.

Some people say other Southern states would have kept their Confederate flags aflutter had it been left to a majority vote. It wasn’t.

In 1994, then-Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. of Alabama moved a Confederate flag from atop the Capitol to a nearby war memorial. The South Carolina Legislature arrived at a similar compromise after a long, tortuous battle ending in July. In January, Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes prodded lawmakers to shrink the Confederate battle emblem that dominated that state’s flag to a small box at the bottom. He got his way. And a month later, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush quietly removed a Confederate banner from a multi-flag display on the Capitol grounds and stuck it in a museum.

Yet here, despite having the highest percentage of black residents of any state (36.3%), there was not enough political will to silence the call for a referendum.

Supporters of the new flag tried to fight the good fight. The NAACP partnered with the Mississippi Economic Council and dozens of other trade organizations and raised $705,501--almost 100 times as much as old-flag supporters--for radio commercials and fliers. Actor Morgan Freeman and former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, both Mississippi natives, contributed handsomely.

Former Gov. William Winter, 78, also has been a crusader, making the case from hamlet to hamlet. “I too love and honor my grandfather who fought in the Civil War,” Winter said. “But he would want what’s best for the future of the state, and that’s a flag for all of us.”

The reality is, people who feel they’re under siege don’t give an inch.

Rainey, who walked 250-plus miles in a pair of cowboy boots as part of a well-scripted campaign to save the old flag, said an attack on the Confederate symbol is an attack on the South--and by extension, an attack on him.

“Some people want to wipe everything Southern off the face of the Earth,” said Rainey, whose family has been in Mississippi longer than cotton. “And just because we’re rednecks, even if we don’t have much, doesn’t mean we’re gonna let them.”

Results of the vote on the Mississippi state flag will be available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/flag.