Roger Wicker, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi, says his state’s flag should be relegated to a museum and replaced with a more unifying state flag. Mississippi has the Confederate battle flag in the upper left corner of its state flag.
U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker on Monday condemned “the white supremacists and neo-Nazis that engaged in violence” in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend and reiterated his position that the Confederate battle emblem on the state flag needs to go.
At Charlottesville during Saturday’s violence, an altered version of the Mississippi flag with a Ku Klux Klan message on it was waved in the streets, prompting renewed calls for changing the state’s banner. But some state leaders say changing the flag is up to Mississippi voters, who chose to keep the banner in 2001.
“I hate to use a tragedy like this, a criminal act of murder, to advance policy,” Republican Wicker said Monday before he spoke to the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership. “But certainly they have no right to be using our state flag as a symbol of white supremacy … It would be more unifying if we put this Mississippi flag in a museum and replaced it with something that was more unifying. That is still my position.”