Georgia House Shrinks Flag’s Rebel Cross

In a surprise move, the Georgia House on Wednesday approved a new state flag that shrinks--but does not eliminate--the Confederate battle emblem and is likely to end the emotional flag controversy in yet another Southern state.

After a debate that meandered from talk of slave ships to Southern hospitality, the House voted, 94 to 82, for the new design, with most Democrats supporting it and most Republicans opposed. Passage in the Senate is expected soon.

The Confederate battle flag has been one of the most divisive issues in Dixie for several years now as Southerners struggle to find the rightful place for a painful piece of history. Even President Bush got ensnared in the affair when he refused last year to support efforts to remove the Confederate flag from atop the Capitol building in South Carolina.

The state flags of Georgia and Mississippi are the last two featuring the controversial Rebel cross. The design of the new Georgia flag is a compromise that is intended to placate civil rights groups without alienating Southern heritage buffs bent on preserving the most enduring symbol of the Confederacy.

It features Georgia’s gold state seal set on a background of royal blue, with a banner that sports five smaller flags--including the current one. The words “Georgia’s History” are written above the mini-flags, making the context unmistakably clear.

The St. Andrews cross, used as a battle flag by the Confederate army, has been cut down in size: from two-thirds of the current flag to about 1% of the new flag.

The design was kept a secret until Wednesday, with Democratic leaders negotiating among themselves behind closed doors. Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, was instrumental in brokering the compromise.

“The governor helped bring a victory for one side without it being a slap in the face to the other,” said Ron Sailor Jr., a black Democratic state representative from suburban Atlanta. “They get to keep the Confederate emblem, but we put it where it belongs--as a part of our history.”

The flag proposal now moves to the Democratic-controlled Senate, where it is expected to be approved Friday or early next week. In the same bill as the flag revisions, lawmakers tossed a bone to heritage groups by agreeing to protect Confederate war memorials and to add the motto “In God we trust” to the new flag.

Still, Rebel die-hards were not happy about the “Georgia compromise.”

“A number of [lawmakers] who said they wouldn’t vote for it turned around and did,” said Charles Lunsford, president of the Heritage Preservation Assn. “Obviously, we’re going to have to now pressure legislators to do the right thing.”

Fighting over the flag is hardly new in Georgia.

In 1956, the Georgia Legislature--then controlled by white men--redrew the state banner to feature the Confederate battle symbol. No previous state flags looked remotely like that. But 1956 was a time when racial barriers were being tested, and the flag change was seen as an act of defiance of the federal government’s desegregation efforts.

Mississippi actually had the 13 stars and crisscrossed blue bars on its flag since 1894. Alabama and South Carolina never did but instead flew the Confederate battle flag from their state capitols.

In 1993, Alabama pulled down its Confederate flag. And after a long, tortuous, well-publicized battle, so did South Carolina in July 2000. But the flag continues to flutter from Confederate monuments near both state capitols.

Civil rights groups--including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--then turned to Mississippi and Georgia, threatening to foment statewide boycotts unless the flags were changed.

It was then that 82-year-old Atlanta architect Cecil Alexander began penciling out potential new flags in his studio and quietly lobbying politicians.

“I never intended to be Georgia’s Betsy Ross,” Alexander said Wednesday. “I just thought I had some interesting ideas.”

This month, Democratic lawmakers--who outnumber Republicans in the state House 105 to 74--met in secret to discuss Alexander’s designs. Barnes also was there, trying to find some middle path between conservative rural Democrats who wanted to keep the Confederate symbol and black lawmakers--now a record 47 strong in the Legislature--who wanted to scrap it.

“The governor wanted to keep this quiet to keep down the controversy until he was ready to bring the idea to the floor,” said Terrell Starr, a Democrat and the Senate’s president pro-tem.

On Wednesday, Democrats pulled off a coup by calling for a vote on a new flag with no warning to their Republican colleagues.

GOP lawmakers countered that Georgia’s flag was about heritage, not hate.

“It’s not our fault that the Ku Klux Klan took a symbol of our heritage and made it into a symbol of racist hate,” said Republican lawmaker Warren Massey.

Barnes made a rare appearance in the House chambers to trumpet his son-of-the-South credentials, including the fact that his great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier captured at Vicksburg, Miss.

“I am a Southerner. My wife is named May-REE,” Barnes told lawmakers. “But this is the most divisive issue in the political spectrum and it must be put to rest.”

In the end, several lawmakers crossed party lines, with 18 Republicans voting for the new flag and 26 Democrats against it.

Civil rights leaders said they would drop their calls for boycotts of Georgia if the state Senate approves the new design.

“This new flag may not be what it ought to be,” said Joseph Lowery, chairman of the Black Leadership Forum and a civil rights veteran. “But it’s certainly better than what it was.”

And so the battle shifts to Mississippi, where voters will decide in a referendum April 17 between the current flag with the Confederate emblem or a new one without it.

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.