Just a little history...
The Confederate States of America went through three different flags
during the Civil War, but the battle flag wasn’t one of them. Instead,
the flag that most people associate with the Confederacy was the battle
flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Designed
by the Confederate politician William Porcher Miles, the flag was
rejected for use as the Confederacy’s official emblem, although it was
incorporated into the two later flags as a canton. It only came to be the flag most prominently associated with the Confederacy after the South lost the war.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the battle flag was used
mostly at veterans’ events and to commemorate fallen Confederate
soldiers. The flag took on new associations in the 1940s, when it began
to appear more frequently in contexts unrelated to the Civil War, such
as University of Mississippi football games.
In 1948, the newly-formed segregationist Dixiecrat party
adopted the flag as a symbol of resistance to the federal government.
In the years that followed, the battle flag became an important part of
segregationist symbolism, and was featured prominently on the 1956
redesign of Georgia’s state flag, a legislative decision that was likely at least partly a
response to the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate school two
years earlier. The flag has also been used by the Ku Klux Klan, though
it is not the Klan’s official flag.
