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.
Is this a common white nationalist conspiracy theory, that a black man designed the flag? First I ever heard of it, and I'll feel very differently about her if this was simple bullshit or if it's her buying into some kind of Nazi propaganda. I have different contempt organs for liars and cultists.
It's... hard to really interpret what the intent is of it. Are they trying to "trick" progressives into thinking the flag isn't a celebration of a bygone rebellion-with-intent-to-keep-black-people-as-property? Even if a black person had made it, it would not change the need to abolish it and cast out all who love it from civil society It has deep, unquestionable symbolic meaning as an celebration of unjust rebellion and racism.
And ALSO, she's wiping out a piece of "white history" in the process. Very weird thing for a white supremacist to be doing.
I have to just assume that Kathy Chism's really, really gullible and parrots random factoids she hears credulously and without critical thinking. Which is definitely closest to the truth, but man. It's just so much dumber than I expect even from a Nazi.