Jamelle Bouie on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour‘s recent remarks acknowledging the Civil War was fought over slavery:
I think non-Southerners have a tendency to underestimate the extent to which Confederate sympathy is a real and persistent phenomena in the contemporary South. Haley Barbour is the Republican governor of one of the most racially conservative states in the country, who came of age in the Jim Crow South. For him to unambiguously attribute Southern secession with the Civil War is kind of a big deal, and we should respect him for it.
To this I would only add that this is the state flag of Misssissippi:
I think we can all acknowledge that a state that still flies a version of the Confederate battle flag is going to have a lot of people that probably weren’t so happy about what Barbour said.
