The flag of the city of Montgomery flies across the street from Montgomery City Hall on Sept. 20, 2024 in Montgomery, Alabama. A high school student has launched a petition to replace the flag, which was adopted in 1952 and includes Confederate symbolism. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
The American Civil War ended in the 1860s. In the 1950s, the city of Montgomery adopted a flag with Confederate symbolism.
That’s why Jeremiah Treece, a 17-year-old student at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, has started a petition to change it.
“One of the things that I’ve been hearing just in general, it [the Confederacy] has a long, debatable history behind it, whether it means, ‘I’m saying it’s the heritage of our country and it means how proud they are to be citizens and to be Americans,’ or if it really is what what it symbolized back then, which was the pro-slavery and a lot of injustice in the city and in the state and just all over the South in general,” he said.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
As of Monday evening, the petition had 951 signatures.
The city flag, according to the North American Vexillological Association, was adopted in 1952. The gray from the flag is a reference to the uniforms of Confederate soldiers. The red is for Alabama. The blue was to represent unity, as Union uniforms were blue. The seven white stars represent the original seven states of the Confederacy.
The flag was selected through a contest by the Chamber of Commerce. The selection committee included Marie Bankhead Owen, a former head of the Alabama Department of Archives and History who used the department to advance a racist interpretation of the Civil War that downplayed the Confederacy’s central goal of maintaining slavery, according to the Associated Press.
Treece, the youth Chief Justice for Alabama Youth in Government, said that he is also on the youth city council, and the flag is by his seat. He said he didn’t think much about it until he read the plaque about what it symbolized.
“After reading it, it did kind of shift my views being there, and it didn’t feel as comfortable sitting in the same seat,” he said.
Treece’s mother, Japonica Bennis, said that she wanted him to be aware that not everyone would be supportive.
“I think it’s very good, the gesture that he’s making, standing tall and standing strong for something he really, truly believes in,” she said.
Montgomery has eliminated some Confederate names from the city. In 2022, the Montgomery County Board of Education renamed schools formerly known for Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In 2021, the city renamed Jefferson Davis Avenue to Fred Gray Avenue, after the legendary civil rights attorney who grew up there.
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed said the city needed ‘to learn the history of this flag and how it was adopted.”
“It spoke to a much different time in the city’s history,” he said in an interview last week. “I think it was a statement flag that the leadership then wanted to make, and we have moved beyond that at this point, and we benefit now, not only from the lessons and the legacy of the civil rights movement. We benefit from the movement that we started under the Equal Justice Initiative and its executive director and founder, Bryan Stevenson, highlighting the history of race and reconciliation in this country.”
He said Montgomery should be a community with the values who made it great, including civil rights leaders and the military. He said it should represent everybody.
“That’s what it means to be the state capital,” he said. “It can’t just be said because symbols matter, so you have to back that up with substance and when there are symbols that are out of line with that, we should acknowledge it and seek input in order to correct it.”
Oronde K. Mitchell, who represents District 6 on the Montgomery City Council, said he thinks the flag change would have a decent change at passing through city council.
“He would just have to present it to the city council,” he said. “And then the city council will determine or vote upon us changing the city’s flag.”
Markers of white supremacy
Confederate monuments went up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as markers of white supremacy, upheld by the Jim Crow regimes of the day.
Rivka Maizlish, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that the Confederate flag was an obscure battle flag during the war that was revived later as a symbol of white supremacy and opposition to integration.
“It’s not just a remnant of the Civil War, although I think that would still be inappropriate, because the Confederacy fought for slavery and white supremacy and against the United States of America,” she said. “But this is specifically a flag that was revived in the 50s and 60s after Brown v Board as a symbol of opposition to integration.”
In 2017, the Alabama Legislature passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which imposed a $25,000 fine for renaming, relocation, removing or alteration of architecturally significant buildings, memorial building, memorial street or monument on public property that has been in place longer than 40 years.
Othni Lathram, director of the Alabama Legislative Services Agency, said over email that he does not believe that the act would apply to flags. But Rep. Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, said that someone at the state level might still try to stop a change in flag.
“I would not be surprised if some state leaders in some way try to push back or try to exert some sort of state effort to limit it. So, I don’t think it does either but, we certainly need to be mindful that there are people that don’t always want to see those changes.”
Ensler, who took Treece on one of his annual trips to Washington, D.C. with local students, said that he is in favor in changing the flag.
“I think this is the situation where we really need to embrace and make it happen so that way he knows, and other young people know that current leadership is open to their ideas,” he said.
He said that young people are future leaders and show the direction the city is moving towards.
Reed said that he supports the changing of the flag. He said that he wears a pin of the flag everyday as mayor, and he is aware of the flag’s history.
“I think the city has to really decide and our city council and our residents have to decide what type of city we want to be moving forward, what type of community we want to be moving forward for our kids and grandkids and future generations,” said Reed. “I mean, if Mississippi can change their state flag, certainly Montgomery ought to be able to hear students from local high school suggest or part upon us to reevaluate our city flag.”
SUPPORT NEWS YOU TRUST.