This year, on orders from Gov. Phil Murphy, only 49 state flags were raised. The Mississippi flag, which carries the Confederate battle emblem, would no longer fly. A U.S. flag was put up in its place.
“The Confederate symbol displayed on the Mississippi state flag is reprehensible and does not reflect our values of inclusivity and equality,” Murphy said in a statement.
This was the latest incident regarding the removal of Mississippi’s flag, considered by many an ugly reminder of slavery. In several cities, statues and memorials to the Confederacy and to those who fought for the South in the Civil War have also been removed.
Several cities and counties in Mississippi, along with all eight of the state’s public universities, have stopped flying the flag. Some took it down in 2015 after nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, were shot and killed by a white supremacist who had posed with the Confederate battle flag in photographs. Five days after the massacre, South Carolina removed that flag from in front of the Statehouse in Columbia.
Oregon removed the Mississippi flag that had flown outside its state capitol in 2016. During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., successfully petitioned city officials to remove the Mississippi flag from downtown, where flags of all 50 states had been flying from light poles.
In response to the flag’s removal from the New Jersey park, Mississippi’s governor, Phil Bryant, a Republican, who has repeatedly defended his state’s flag, said he was disappointed in the decision by Murphy, a Democrat.
The Confederate battle flag was placed on the top left quadrant of Mississippi’s flag in 1894 — 29 years after the South surrendered and the Civil War ended. The Mississippi flag still hangs in such places as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It also hangs in the lobby of the Hall of the States, an office building that is a short walk from the U.S. Capitol, where the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures have offices.
But in New Jersey, Murphy credited state Sen. Sandra Cunningham, D-Jersey City, with bringing the issue of the flag’s presence at Liberty State Park to his attention. She said that the Confederate flag “symbolizes an era of hate, violence and division,” and she applauded Murphy’s “decision to remove this hateful symbol from Liberty State Park.”
New Jersey Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver also applauded the governor’s order, saying on Twitter, “There is a difference between acknowledging history versus glorifying it.”
In New York, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department said there were no displays with all 50 state flags in the city. She also said Parks officials could not remember denying a request from a state to fly its flag at an event for which a permit was required.
In 2001, Mississippi voted by a nearly 2-1 margin in a statewide election to leave the flag as is. Since then, especially after the attack in Charleston, some Mississippi officials, including its two U.S. senators and the speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, called for a change. Several towns stopped flying it from municipal buildings.
In 2015, the University of Mississippi removed the flag from the place where, in the 1960s, segregationists had faced off against federal marshals over the admission of the school’s first black student, James Meredith. Ole Miss placed the last state flag it flew in the university’s archives, along with resolutions from students and faculty members calling for its removal.
Another school, the University of Southern Mississippi, also removed the flag in 2015. Among its alumni is Bryant, who said then that state-funded schools should fly the flag because “they should be respectful of the people of the state.”
The flag issue has simmered in Mississippi since then. In March, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is running for president, called for taking down Confederate statues and moving them to museums. She also said, in response to a question, that Mississippi needed a different flag.
Bryant, in his statement after Murphy’s order, reiterated his argument about the flag.
“As I have repeatedly said, the voters of Mississippi should decide what the state flag is or is not,” Bryant said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.