Mississippi votes for flag some see as a slavery symbol

Mississippi says No. The state, of which William Faulkner said the past is never dead, has overwhelmingly rejected a new flag in a referendum where voters were asked to repudiate the battle flag of the Confederacy, seen by blacks as a symbol of slavery.

With 94 per cent of the vote counted, the old flag has won by 65 per cent to 35 per cent.

The state is the last in the US to retain the Confederate battle flag on its standard and the voters' decision will be a bitter disappointment to business, the main churches, the vast majority of state-wide-elected officials and black organisations, who have warned that the state could suffer economically from perceptions of its continued adherence to its violently racist past.

Within the last year the governments of South Carolina and Georgia have voted to significantly reduce the size of the battle flag's presence on the state flag but had done so without putting it to referendum.

Mississippi, with 2.8 million people, is 61 per cent white and 36 per cent black.

Voters had two choices: keep the current 1894 flag with the Confederate emblem of 13 white stars on a blue X, or adopt a new flag with 20 white stars on a blue square, denoting Mississippi's role as the 20th state.

The poll happened after the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled last May that the state technically has no flag, because the 1894 design was accidentally deleted when the state code was updated in 1906. The Legislature decided to let the voters choose.

Jackson State University political scientist, Dr Leslie McLemore, said the campaign had stirred deep-seated racial resentment and hatred that would be difficult to heal.

But the campaign was unlike previous ones in the South. There were few if any threats and no burning crosses, and defenders of the flag worked hard to distance their cause from both slavery and the segregationist campaigns of the 1960s.

Such sanitising of the Confederacy finds little echo in the black community whose leaders insist the two issues can not be separated. But early reports from the count in Mississippi suggest the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People failed to get out the black vote - many black voters told pollsters they thought a new flag would have little effect on their status and regarded the flag as a "white problem". The latest poll suggested one third of blacks would vote to keep the flag.

Some campaigners see signs of hope in the tone of the debate. "I think that the recent changes, including discussions on changing symbols, reopening old civil rights murder cases, as well as developments like new business, all indicate that the South is maturing," said Ms Susan Glisson of the Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.