“Civil War (Or, Who Do We Think We Are?)” mirrors the conflicted racial history of the South, arriving at no conclusions but demonstrating the need for an answer to the question its title poses: Who do we think we are?
For the young Black Mississippi activists who organized the BLM Sip march in June 2020, changing the state flag was an important symbolic start. Now, they want to bring true racial justice to the Magnolia State when it comes to the areas of voting, criminal justice, education and more.
In June 2020, attorney Crystal Welch set out to stop an effort to replace the 1894 Mississippi state flag with the Stennis flag. Though the Stennis design did not include the Confederate Battle Flag, it featured an ode to the Bonnie Blue Flag, which once served as a symbol of Mississippi’s secession.
U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Black Democrat, was the lone Mississippi member to vote in favor of removing monuments devoted to white supremacists from the halls of the nation’s Capitol today. A 285-120 majority passed the bill, House Resolution 3005, this evening with all 120 nay votes coming from Republican members, including two from Mississippi.
For 126 years, a banner based upon the Confederacy’s first national flag and the Confederate battle flag waved atop poles and government buildings, reminding residents of the Blackest state in the nation that white supremacy still ruled in Mississippi.
The Confederate sympathizers across the state sleep well tonight. Oh, 2020 was a tumultuous year for them, as they saw their beloved stars and bars removed from the state flag. But they know that they still have outsized political influence in the state.
n the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country. The holiday was Memorial Day—an annual commemoration born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868 as a form of “reconciliation.”
On the penultimate day of the Confederate Heritage Month, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made a bold declaration: “There is not systemic racism in America.” The announcement, if it were true, could come as a relief to the 38% of Mississippians who are Black. But around 16% of those residents will not have the opportunity to express their gratitude to the governor in the next election because they are systematically disenfranchised due to an 1890 Jim Crow felony voting law.
In “Look Away, Look Away,” filmmaker Patrick O’Connor captures the battle to change, or keep, Mississippi’s state flag by turning his lens on Mississippians who made the flag fight their fight. In five years of filming, he came to see the debate as about more than the flag. The story is about identity itself: “It’s about who you think you are,” O’Connor says.
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