We were just a few months into the pandemic, and into publishing the Mississippi Free Press, when Crystal Welch called me in early June 2020. It was a time in history most of us won’t ever forget: We were hiding from COVID-19 in our homes, wiping counters down with peroxide, learning to have every damn thing delivered. And all around us, the waves of long-overdue racial reckoning were beating at our gates after the May 25, 2020, police murder of George Floyd up north.
Here in Mississippi, the state flag with the Confederate emblem in its canton had long branded our state as one that still embraced the horrors of a war to maintain slavery; Confederate officers forming the Ku Klux Klan to end Reconstruction and Black gains; and then the embrace of Jim Crow laws written and pushed by top state leaders including James Z. George and Stephen D. Lee, all just honored in myriad ways from statues, to schools, counties and even college honors programs named after them.
Black Mississippians, with some white allies, had fought long and hard both to bring down that flag, as well as to teach Mississippians the often-hidden history that had caused generations of systemic inequity for them to overcome, in America’s Blackest state. The death of George Floyd led to a time, although sadly fleeting as we see now as its progress rolls back rapidly, when Americans of all races found the courage to band together to tackle America’s racist structures.
But, as Crystal Welch knew well, that effort shouldn’t be surface, and it shouldn’t give up too much to appease and rework the people of the past who helped put and keep those structures in place. Yes, we should change the flag, but we shouldn’t replace it with one with embedded homage to the Confederacy, its purpose, realities and ongoing effects.
‘A Real And Total Change With No Appeasement’
Crystal, long a supportive colleague in the fight for a better Mississippi and a casual friend I’d usually see at social events, suddenly called me in early June and asked for a