PHILADELPHIA, Miss. -- The Confederate battle flag was coming down everywhere this summer. National retailers stopped selling it. South Carolina's Legislature ordered it removed from the Statehouse grounds.
Momentum swelled across a nation horrified by the killings of nine black worshippers in a historic church in Charleston, S.C. The man held in those killings was shown in Web posts posing with the Confederate flag.
That anti-flag sentiment swung into Mississippi, the last place in the nation to incorporate the emblem into its state flag. The state's two U.S. senators, both Republicans, said the flag should go. A Mississippi-born leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the bedrock faith of many of the state's conservatives, wrote, "Let's take down that flag."
The powerful speaker of the state House of Representatives, Philip Gunn, gained national attention when he said his Christian belief dictated that the flag "needs to be removed." A handful of towns started removing it from city quarters. Even state college football coaches said the flag should bite the dust.
Then that sentiment met the rest of Mississippi.
Fans of the flag rallied. Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, tweeted about the South Carolina gunman: "No symbol or flag or website or book or movie made him evil." The governor, Tea Party favorite Phil Bryant, agreed, saying the flag should stay.
By the time the historic Neshoba County Fair rolled around in late July, flag supporters had found their footing.
The grounds -- where a campaigning Ronald Reagan once attended to declare his belief in "state's rights" -- were festooned with state flags and Confederate banners. They were draped from many of the hundreds of cottages that ring the red-dirt horse-racing track. They flew outside the RVs parked beneath the pines. They flapped from the backs of pickups.
"They just need to leave that flag alone," said Bill McCrory, 35, watching the harness races on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. He was wearing a camouflage-colored Confederate-flag baseball cap, with "Join the Cause" on the front and "Rebel" on the back. "They think it's racist, but it's not."
So when Gunn stepped to the lectern at the fair, it heralded a notable moment in the state's history. The man taking on the flag was not a carpetbagger or an outside agitator but one of the state's most powerful conservatives.
"I see the ladies from the Philip Gunn fan club all around here," Gunn began, playfully acknowledging flag wavers in the audience. "It is true that I voiced my opinion about the flag a few weeks ago and made my opinions known," he continued.
Then Gunn, who declined to speak for this article, seemed to wilt, if not retreat. "They are my opinions and my opinions alone," he said in an offhand tone. "They don't stand for anybody else. ... The fact is we can't do anything about the flag today. The Legislature is not in session. There is no bill before us. It's not on the ballot next Tuesday. It's not on the ballot next November."
And that was it.
Mississippi's most powerful supporter of a new flag no longer seemed to be such a powerful supporter of a new flag. With the governor and lieutenant governor already on the record against it, prospects for removing the flag seemed as stagnant as a pool of Delta rainwater.
Near the Mississippi River, the Confederate battle flag flies from the pole in front of Shawn Quick and Christine Councell's one-story, brick ranch house.
The house sits in the middle of a riverfront industrial district. The landscape is railroad tracks and tanker cars, and abandoned metal buildings. The air conditioner is on the blink, so their conversation is held on the semi-shaded front porch, with their pit bull, Coco, and her puppies nearby. Their other adult pit bull, Dixie, was eaten by an alligator recently and carted off down the river.
It is 97 degrees.
The flag is emblazoned with "The South Will Rise Again."
"I like it just for the history of it," Quick says. "I've had it a long time. When we moved in, the pole was already there, so we put it up."
Both are aware that some of their fellow Mississippians find the flag offensive.
"They just don't know their history," Councell says.
"You got that right," Quick adds.
This is a common sentiment in white Mississippi -- that the Confederate battle flag is a historic banner that embodies the noble service and sacrifice of men who fought for "state's rights."
The other side of state's rights in Mississippi evokes the Black Codes, the Mississippi Plan, the pig law, a gulag of prison farms, poll taxes, Jim Crow segregation, and the killings of Medgar Evers and the three civil-rights workers. Mississippi's Confederate veterans won the battle for white supremacy, built monuments to themselves in nearly every town and set in place a system of oppression that lasted until the civil-rights movement finally knocked it away.
A recent 1,100-mile trip across the state, that included dozens of interviews, revealed pockets of support for a new flag among whites, mostly in college towns and larger cities. Nearly all blacks are against the existing flag, but there is widespread apathy that anything will be done to change it.
"My district would be in support of a new flag, but they're like, 'This has a snowball's chance in hell,'" said Kimberly Campbell, a state House representative from the heavily black Jackson area.
Deep in the heart of the Delta, dark clouds move across the sky and rain falls in sheets in the historic blues town of Clarksdale, one of the municipalities that has taken down the flag. Bill Luckett, the mayor, is an actor, lawyer and co-owner of a blues club with actor Morgan Freeman, a native son. He's also a white man elected by a populace that is 79 percent black.
There was no vote on the flag issue.
"I just checked with the city attorney to see if I had the authority, and I did, so I just did it," Luckett said of removing it.
Aldermen in a few cities, including Columbus, Starkville and Hattiesburg, voted to remove the flag after the Charleston shootings. Elsewhere, the issue is complicated.
Washington County lies along the Mississippi River on the south end of the Delta. It is 71 percent black. Aldermen voted 3-2 along racial lines to remove the state flag in 2001. But they put it back up in 2012. And in July, they voted to keep it up, again voting 3-2, this time with a black alderman siding with two whites.
More than 60 state celebrities, including Freeman, signed a full-page ad in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger advocating for a new flag, an attempt to spur new momentum for the effort.
But several of the list's big names -- Freeman, John Grisham, Archie Manning, Kathryn Stockett -- haven't actually lived in the state for years, as commentators on the newspaper's website wryly noted.
More importantly: Other than the NAACP, which for more than two decades has kept up a steady bid to dump the flag, there is no serious organization devoted to retiring the banner.
In the primary round of elections earlier in August -- which included every elected office in the state -- no campaign turned on the issue. Few candidates even mentioned it.
Whit Waide, a political science professor at Mississippi State University in Starkville, whose family has been in Mississippi since statehood, said: "I would give up this job if it would mean a new state flag."
He's also well-placed to help make that happen. His college roommate and best friend is Reeves, the lieutenant governor. If Reeves supported a bill for a new flag, along with Gunn, the House speaker, it would almost certainly pass.
"I love him, he's my best friend," Waide says, shaking his head, "and I just hate that he's on the wrong side of this."
Back at the Neshoba County Fair, Tommy Williams' family has owned a cottage in the first turn of the racetrack for more than three decades. A retired administrator with the Mississippi Department of Health, he describes himself as a "Civil War historian" and thus has always flown a Confederate flag at the fair. He's gracious on the subject and says he can certainly understands other points of view.
But when he takes a reporter onto the second-floor deck, the atmosphere changes.
He quiets down the all-white crowd, then announces that a reporter is here, writing about the flag.
Silence ensues. One man yells something angrily. Another leans forward and says, "They can get rid of the flag all right -- just take the NAACP out of the state with it."
Another sidles up, showing a cellphone photograph of a truck's bumper sticker: "Don't Blame Me -- I voted for the White Guy."
"How about that?" he says. "You ever see anything funny as that?"
Another man approached and politely said, "The Irish were bred with the African slaves, you know? Even the Irish, we were slaves. At some point, you just have to get over it."
The day eases slowly into dusk in Mississippi. Orange fires burn after midnight from a sawmill plant in hill country. Mist hovers above the river.
The voices of Mississippi echo in these hours.
There's Robert Khayat, the chancellor at Ole Miss, who single-handedly got the tens of thousands of fans to stop flying the Confederate flag at football games. He did it by banning sticks inside the stadium. Could the state actually change its flag?
"That'd be a tough one," he says.
Derrick Johnson, head of the state chapter of the NAACP, said, "The problem is not so much the flag as the mindset it represents."
Then comes the soft Southern accent of David Sansing, Mississippi's pre-eminent historian, who is now professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi.
"Mississippians do not study their past," he says, "they absorb it."
More faintly, "We're a strange group."
Fainter still, fading away, talking about Mississippi's eternal attitude toward the rest of the world: "We don't really need you to like us."
SundayMonday on 08/23/2015