Flag of Mississippi

State of Mississippi

Other names	Mississippi flag, "In God We Trust" flag, New Magnolia flag
Use	Civil and state flag
Proportion	3∶5
Adopted	January 11, 2021; 3 years ago (2021-01-11)
Design	A white magnolia blossom surrounded by 21 stars and the words 'In God We Trust' written below, all put over a blue Canadian pale with two gold borders on a red field. The topmost star is composed of a pattern of five diamonds. The other 20 stars are white.
Designed by	Rocky Vaughan, Sue Anna Joe, Kara Giles, Dominique Pugh, and Micah Whitson[1]

The flag of Mississippi consists of a white magnolia blossom surrounded by 21 stars and the words "In God We Trust" written below, all put over a blue Canadian pale with two vertical gold borders on a red field. The topmost star is composed of a pattern of five diamonds, an Indigenous symbol;^[2] the other 20 stars are white, as Mississippi was the 20th state to join the Union. The flag was adopted on January 11, 2021.

Mississippi has had three official state flags in its history. The first flag, known as the "Magnolia Flag", was adopted in 1861 and consisted of a "Flag of white ground, a magnolia tree in the centre, a blue field in the upper left hand corner with a white star in the centre, ... with a red border and a red fringe at the extremity of the Flag".^[3] The Magnolia Flag was declared to be "null and void" by a state constitutional convention in 1865 and the state was left without an official flag until the second one was adopted in 1894.^[4]

The second flag, designed by Edward N. Scudder and adopted in 1894, consisted of a triband of three equal horizontal stripes of blue, white, and red, with a canton of the Confederate battle flag. The thirteen stars on the state flag officially represented "the number of the original states of the Union", although they are sometimes thought to be for the states that seceded from the Union plus Missouri and Kentucky, which had both Confederate and Union governing bodies.^[5] From 1894 to 1956, and again from 2003 to 2020, this was the only state flag to incorporate the Confederate battle flag into its design, Georgia being the other from 1956 to 2003. In response to the George Floyd protests in 2020, state legislators proposed new flag designs omitting the Confederate flag.^[6][7]

On June 27, 2020, Governor Tate Reeves stated that if the Mississippi Legislature passed a bill that weekend addressing the flag issue, he would sign it into law.^[8][9][10] Subsequently, on June 28, 2020, the Legislature passed a bill to repeal the sections of the Mississippi State Code which made provisions for a state flag, mandate the Mississippi Department of Archives and History develop a plan for the removal of the former flag from public buildings within 15 days of the bill's effective date, and establish a commission to design a replacement that would exclude the Confederate battle flag and include the U.S. national motto "In God We Trust".^{[11][12][13][14]} Reeves then signed it into law on June 30, 2020.^[15][16]

The third flag was designed by Rocky Vaughan, Sue Anna Joe, Kara Giles, Dominique Pugh, and Micah Whitson. It was chosen by the commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag, which was established by the same June 2020 Mississippi House bill which retired the second flag. The commission received thousands of submissions, and narrowed them down to a single choice, which was submitted for public vote as a ballot measure on November 3, 2020. Voters approved the new design in a two-choice vote but the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the new proposed design was never approved by voters directly.^[17][18] It is one of three U.S. state flags to feature the words "In God We Trust" (the U.S. national motto), with the other two being those of Florida and Georgia.