JACKSON, Miss. -- An effort to remove a Confederate battle emblem from Mississippi's flag appears to have failed after sponsors didn't submit paperwork to put an initiative on the 2018 ballot.
The petition drive started in response to the June 2015 slayings of nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, S.C., and was part of a movement across the South to rethink the public display of Confederate symbols.
It ended Friday when sponsors missed a one-year deadline to gather signatures from registered voters.
South Carolina removed a Confederate battle flag from its Statehouse grounds weeks after the Charleston massacre. New Orleans leaders voted to move four Confederate monuments off public property. The private Vanderbilt University announced in August that it will remove the word "Confederate" from the name of a campus dormitory in Nashville, Tenn.
In Mississippi, however, the fury over the Confederate flag has signified no change in the banner's official status.
Mississippi's complicated initiative process requires tens of thousands of signatures from each of the five congressional districts that the state used in the 1990s. Most proposals fail before getting to the ballot, and that appears to be the fate of Initiative 55, "The Flag For All Mississippians Act," which proposes clearing the Confederate emblem from the flag.
The initiative's chief sponsor, Sharon Brown of Jackson, said gathering signatures was a struggle in most places. She said in late September she wouldn't get enough people to sign petitions.
"Not unless God intervenes between now and the time the deadline is," Brown said.
She didn't return phone calls seeking an update later.
Today is the deadline for gathering signatures on Initiative 55, but petitions with verified signatures of registered voters had to be submitted by Friday because the secretary of state's office is closed during the weekend, said Leah Rupp Smith, spokesman for the office. She said no paperwork was turned in by close of business Friday.
Since 1894, Mississippi has had the flag with the Confederate symbol in its upper left corner. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the flag, while widely displayed, had lacked official status since 1906, when state law books were updated and the flag design was not included. After public hearings degenerated into shouting matches between flag supporters and opponents in the fall of 2000, legislators opted to put the design question on a statewide ballot in 2001, and voters reaffirmed it.
Critics say the Confederate battle emblem is a reminder of slavery and segregation and has no place on the flag of a state with a 38 percent black population, the largest percentage of any state in the nation. Defenders call it a symbol of heritage, and some have held flag-waving protests on university campuses.
The white man charged in the Charleston church killings, Dylann Roof, had previously posed in online photos holding the Confederate battle flag.
Republican Gov. Phil Bryant has said any reconsideration of the flag design should be done by voters.
A Section on 10/15/2016