No American state has argued about its flag longer or harder than Georgia. The current design, adopted in 2003, is the state's third flag in three years and its fifth since 1956. It resolved the fight over the Confederate battle emblem by reaching further back into Confederate iconography: the flag is a close cousin of the "Stars and Bars," the first national flag of the Confederacy, with Georgia's coat of arms set in a ring of thirteen stars. How the state got there is a story that runs through Reconstruction, massive resistance, the Atlanta Olympics, and one of the more surprising gubernatorial defeats in modern Southern politics.
Stars and Bars, round one
Georgia had no official flag until 1879, when state senator Herman H. Perry, a former Confederate officer, introduced legislation creating one. His design took the Stars and Bars, three horizontal bars of red, white, and red with a blue canton, and simply removed the stars, leaving a blue vertical band at the hoist. The derivation was obvious to everyone at the time; it was a memorial to the Confederate dead by a veteran of the war.
In 1902 the legislature ordered the state coat of arms added to the blue band. Over the following decades the arms drifted informally into a full state seal, rendered differently by different flag makers, and by the 1920s the seal-on-blue-band version had settled into standard use. That flag, Confederate in ancestry but quiet about it, flew until 1956.
1956: the battle flag session
The 1956 General Assembly convened with one overriding purpose: resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. Governor Marvin Griffin's legislative program that year was explicitly built on "massive resistance" to federally ordered integration, and in the middle of that session, on February 13, 1956, the legislature redrew the state flag. The bill, driven by Atlanta attorney John Sammons Bell and state senators Jefferson Lee Davis and Willis Harden, kept the seal band at the hoist and gave the remaining two thirds of the flag to the Confederate battle emblem, the blue saltire and white stars on red. There were no public hearings and no referendum.
Defenders later described the change as an early Civil War centennial tribute. The record is not kind to that reading. Denmark Groover, the governor's floor leader, told the House the new flag "will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for." Where Mississippi confined the battle emblem to a canton, Georgia made it the flag.
Three decades of argument
As the battle emblem hardened into a symbol of resistance to civil rights, pressure to remove it grew. Governor Zell Miller tried in 1993, backed by Black legislators and much of Atlanta's business establishment, and was beaten so badly in the legislature that the effort nearly cost him reelection the following year; he dropped the subject in his second term. The 1996 Atlanta Olympics brought international attention and renewed appeals from the city, and the General Assembly still would not move. By 2000, Georgia and Mississippi were the last states flying the battle emblem, and South Carolina's separate statehouse flag fight was making national news weekly.
The Barnes flag and its price
Governor Roy Barnes decided to spend political capital rather than wait. In January 2001 he pushed a replacement through the legislature in days, with no public hearings. The new flag, adapted from a concept by Atlanta architect Cecil Alexander, was a blue field with a large state seal above a small strip of five historical flags flown over Georgia, the 1956 flag tiny among them, under the caption "Georgia's History."
Almost nobody loved it. The North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey rated it the worst-designed state or provincial flag in North America, dead last of 72, memorably compared to a menu. Heritage groups organized "Boot Barnes" campaigns, and self-described flaggers dogged the governor's appearances. In November 2002 Republican Sonny Perdue, who had promised a public vote on the flag, upset Barnes to become Georgia's first Republican governor since Reconstruction. The flag was not the only reason, but no serious account of that election leaves it out.
2003: back to the First National
Perdue's promised referendum arrived in modified form. House Bill 380, passed in 2003, first created a new flag and then put it to an advisory vote. The design returned to the state's 1879 instincts: the Stars and Bars layout, red-white-red bars and a blue canton, now carrying thirteen white stars around the coat of arms in gold, with "In God We Trust" beneath. The arms are the arch marked "Constitution" on three pillars, a swordsman on guard, and the motto "Wisdom, Justice, Moderation." By statute the red and blue match the shades of the United States flag. The official rationale assigns the thirteen stars to the original thirteen colonies, of which Georgia was one; the flag's silhouette says Confederate First National to anyone who knows the reference.
On March 2, 2004, voters chose between the 2003 flag and the 2001 Barnes flag. The 1956 battle emblem flag was not on the ballot, to the fury of its partisans. The new flag won with 73.1 percent of the vote, and the battle emblem, which had flown over Georgia for 45 years, stayed retired. The compromise's irony is durable: Georgia removed the most notorious Confederate symbol from its flag by adopting a subtler one, and the arrangement has now outlasted every previous Georgia flag except the ones it was designed to replace.
References
[1] "State Flags of Georgia," New Georgia Encyclopedia. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/state-flags-of-georgia/
[2] Georgia Senate Research Office, "The State Flag of Georgia: The 1956 Change in Its Historical Context" (2000). https://www.senate.ga.gov/sro/documents/studycommrpts/00stateflag.pdf
[3] "Georgia State Flag Referendum (March 2004)," Ballotpedia. https://ballotpedia.org/Georgia_State_Flag_Referendum_(March_2004)
[4] "Flag of Georgia (U.S. state)," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
[5] Georgia House Bill 380 (2003), codified at O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 (description of the state flag).
[6] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State and Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/
[7] "A history of Georgia's state flag: Things to know," Atlanta Journal-Constitution. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/history-georgia-state-flag-things-know/rQ0DK2QtuSP13EStbLC5iK/