The flag of Arkansas is built around a diamond, which is not a generic shape here. Diamonds had been discovered in Pike County in 1906, and when a schoolteacher named Willie Hocker designed the flag a few years later, Arkansas was the only state in the country that produced them. Her red, white, and blue design of 1913 has since picked up one addition with a long political afterlife: a star for the Confederacy, added in 1923, that sits above the state's name to this day and that the legislature declined to redefine as recently as 2019.
A battleship needs a flag
The occasion for the flag was naval. The USS Arkansas, a new dreadnought battleship, was commissioned in 1912, and the Pine Bluff chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted to present the ship with a state flag, following the custom of the day. There was a problem: Arkansas did not have one. The chapter turned the gap into a contest, and some 65 entries came in, ranging from crayon drawings to finished silk flags.
The winning design came from Willie Kavanaugh Hocker of Wabbaseka, a schoolteacher and a member of the chapter. Her flag had a red field carrying a large white diamond with a wide blue border, 25 white stars in the border, and three blue stars in the white center. It had no words on it. The selection committee liked it but asked for the state's name, and Hocker reworked the center herself, setting "ARKANSAS" between the stars, one above and two below. The General Assembly adopted her flag on February 26, 1913.
What Hocker's design says
Hocker documented her symbolism precisely, which makes Arkansas's flag unusually legible for one with this much going on. The diamond records the 1906 diamond strike near Murfreesboro, which made Arkansas the only diamond-producing state in the Union; the field is now Crater of Diamonds State Park, where the public can still dig. The 25 white stars around the border count Arkansas's place as the 25th state, admitted in 1836.
The three blue stars worked triple duty in her scheme: the three nations whose flags had flown over Arkansas soil (Spain, France, and the United States), the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that brought the territory into the United States, and Arkansas's position as the third state carved from that purchase, after Louisiana and Missouri. The red, white, and blue palette matched the national flag. Every element had a stated meaning on file, which would matter later, when the state changed one.
The 1923 star
In 1923 the General Assembly added a fourth blue star to the diamond, explicitly to commemorate Arkansas's membership in the Confederate States of America. The first arrangement put two stars above the name and two below; an act of 1924 settled the current layout, with the Confederate star alone above "ARKANSAS" and the three original stars below it in an inverted triangle. The change came in the same era that put Confederate monuments on courthouse squares across the South, two generations after the war ended.
The star has been contested in the modern era, most seriously in 2019. State Representative Charles Blake of Little Rock filed House Bill 1487, which would have kept the flag's appearance identical but redesignated the top star to honor the Quapaw, Osage, Caddo, and other Native American nations of Arkansas. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson endorsed the change, calling it the right thing to do. The House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee voted it down anyway, twice, in February and March 2019. A revised version that would have assigned the top star to the United States also failed. The statute still reads as it did in 1924: the star above the name is for the Confederacy.
Designers versus the word "ARKANSAS"
In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 state and provincial flags, Arkansas placed 45th with a score of 4.59 out of 10. The main complaint was predictable: flag designers regard lettering as an admission of defeat, since a flag that needs its name printed on it is conceding that the design alone does not identify it. NAVA's own principles put it bluntly under the heading "No Lettering or Seals."
The criticism reached the governor's office. When survey organizer Ted Kaye suggested to a reporter that the word was the flag's weakness, Governor Mike Huckabee was unmoved: "They had a problem with the word 'Arkansas'? It's the name of our state!" It is a fair summary of the gap between vexillologists and everyone else. Set the word aside and the underlying structure is strong: a bold diamond, a disciplined three-color palette, and a border of stars doing actual counting. Hocker's original, wordless submission is the version design critics wish had survived the committee.
References
[1] "Official State Flag," Encyclopedia of Arkansas. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/official-state-flag-3151/
[2] "Willie Kavanaugh Hocker (1862-1944)," Encyclopedia of Arkansas. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/willie-kavanaugh-hocker-2948/
[3] "History of the Arkansas State Flag," Arkansas Secretary of State. https://www.sos.arkansas.gov/education/arkansas-history/history-of-the-flag
[4] "Flag of Arkansas," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Arkansas
[5] "Arkansas legislators rejected a proposal to change the meaning of a star on the state flag that honors the Confederacy," CNN, February 28, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/us/arkansas-state-flag-proposal-trnd
[6] Ted Kaye, "The American State/Provincial Flag Survey," Raven: A Journal of Vexillology, Vol. 8 (2001), NAVA.