Wicker Calls For State Flag To Be Redesigned

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – One of Mississippi’s Republican U.S. senators says the Confederate battle emblem should be removed from the state flag because it offends many people and gives a false impression of the state.

Sen. Roger Wicker’s statement Wednesday makes him the second top-tier Republican elected official calling for Mississippi to change the flag it has used since Reconstruction. He says it “should be put in a museum and replaced by one that is more unifying.”

The state House speaker, Philip Gunn, said Monday that as a Christian, he believes the flag has become offensive.

Mississippi voters decided in 2001 to keep the flag. The massacre of nine worshippers in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, restarted debate about the Old South. The man charged in the slayings had posed in photos with the Confederate battle flag.