One of the first things I saw when The Observer relocated from another Southern city just a state away to Arkansas was the enormous state flag that was flying from a number of poles in Little Rock.Why does that large flapping object resemble the Confederate battle flag so much?I questioned myself. The color scheme and the white stars covered in blue stripes were all a little too similar.
I expected a fast Google search would validate my fears given the history of the South (and current reality regarding who controls politics in most of the region—after all, a group in Lawrence County is actively working on a whites-only enclave). States with Confederate flags include Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and even California, which many conservatives blame for being the epicenter of unbridled liberalism. Mississippi used to proudly wave a state banner that prominently showed the Confederate battle flag in its upper left corner, albeit the symbolism adorning the banners may not be as clear to observers in the twenty-first century. That flag was in use until 2020, when protests in support of George Floyd, the Black man slain by a Minnesota police officer, led to its formal replacement. It wouldn’t be shocking if the state flag of Arkansas, a state whose development was heavily reliant on slave labor, was also associated with the so-called Lost Cause.
However, I discovered that I was only partially correct. Arkansas’s flag and its association with the Confederacy have a rich history that began decades after the South’s defeat.
According to the Arkansas Secretary of State website, Willie Kavanaugh Hocker, a woman, created the flag in 1913 after winning a statewide competition organized by the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Pine Bluff branch. The only differences between Hocker’s initial design and the current one are that the early 20th century version lacked the word Arkansas printed in the center and featured three stars rather than four. The three stars at the time stood for France, Spain, and the United States, which are the three nations to which Arkansas has belonged.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise across the nation (did they ever go?), tearing up Black neighborhoods, particularly in the South, and parading through the streets. Neill Bohlinger, among other candidates, was backed by the KKK in Arkansas and went on to earn a seat in the Arkansas House of Representatives. Bohlinger proposed House Concurrent Resolution 4 in 1923, and when it was approved, it produced a fourth star that symbolized Arkansas’s active Confederate involvement.
But adding the fourth star alone wasn’t enough; Bohlinger went one step further with House Concurrent Resolution 11, which positioned the star above the word Arkansas, giving it a spooky sense of authority over the state. It makes sense (in a twisted way) that a portion of Arkansas’ flag ended up being a symbol of the Confederacy because the KKK was closely linked to Arkansas politics and the state’s Little Rock was formerly home to the national KKK chapter for women. The flag that was altered by white supremacists and state lawmakers who support them is being flown in Arkansas today.
Is it time to take that fourth star off at last? This is not a novel concept; there have been failed attempts to either eliminate the late-addition star completely or to modify the symbol’s meaning in the past to reflect the state’s Indigenous tribes.
However, there are moments when I question why the Confederacy is singled out because the other three flag stars—France, Spain, and the United States—all significantly contributed to slavery and benefited from the appalling treatment and tyranny of Black people (as well as Native Americans). The United States was experiencing what is described as the nadir of race relations at the time the Arkansas flag was first raised, which included some of the most heinous, pervasive, and condoned acts of violence against Black people in the nation’s history.
Maybe when we think about systems of oppression and symbolism, we need to think bigger.
It’s dragon-slaying time!
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