Jason Morgan Ward, Professor of History, was recently cited in the July 1 Vox article “Mississippi’s future lies with its new state flag.” The piece discusses the Mississippi governor’s recent decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state flag. The author cites an earlier, 2015 article that Ward wrote in The American Historian, titled “The Cause that was Never Lost.” Read an excerpt from the Vox piece below along with the full article here.

“However, the symbolism of the Confederacy lives on. The flag has always been ‘a banner for a white supremacist regime that could not exist without constant violence,’ according to Emory University historian Jason Morgan Ward. While some narratives identify Klansmen and neo-Nazis as the extremists who transformed the flag from a supposedly non-racist heritage into a symbol of white hate, the Confederacy — formed over a commitment to slavery — was always an ‘unabashedly white supremacist crusade,’ said Ward. And its supporters, whether through laws or violence, acted in the oppression of Black people, he said. This expression continued through white people proudly displaying and waving the battle flag during Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era.”