Clark is not as confident. It all hangs on whether they can summon the African-American vote, and many are not bothered, dismissing the flag as a white man's flag, the issue as a white man's issue.
Eugene Bryant, state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), says "getting out" the vote is what they know how to do. There is an inevitability about the process, he says. "For most Mississippians, white and black, it's a step towards racial reconciliation and removing the stigma of racism from Mississippi's historical past." World economics dictate that this is the road they will go down, he insists, warning that investment in the fast-growing state will be hit unless they take it.
While the NAACP points to the issue of slavery, it is the latter theme taken up by Wilson's campaign. Put simply, he says, they are asking: "Do you want your children to be able to come home to jobs in Mississippi, or must they leave as they have done in the past?"
Yet this campaign's revisiting of old icons would not have been conducted in the same manner in the past. "It's a much more civil argument than would have happened 40 years ago," Wilson says.
The state has changed and is changing. Racism is still present, still exercises a silent social pressure to conform on white communities, but cannot be expressed openly. The bombs, threats, lynchings, even the Klan, are of the past. Campaigners for the flag must distance themselves from the excesses committed ostensibly in the name of the Confederacy.
Stewart, a Democrat, even insists he is a member of the NAACP, though the organisation says it has no record of his membership. No matter. That he, one of the foremost public advocates of the retention of the flag, should even suggest as much is a sign of change.
He says the campaign against the flag in Oxford and Ole Miss reflects white liberal paternalism - if they were serious about racism they would do something about poverty and the conditions the blacks find themselves in, instead of tilting at windmills.
But they are already doing that, says Sarah Glisson, director of the university's Institute for Racial Reconciliation, not least with the $100 million illiteracy campaign the college has launched state-wide, courtesy of a record donation from Jim Barksdale of Microsoft. She is also involved in campaigns for a living wage and community outreach programmes. She says the university has changed dramatically since she came as a student in 1992. Then the battle flags could be seen everywhere at matches. Now, following a decision of the student senate, the display of the flag at games was banned by the university with relatively little resentment.
Occasional racial incidents, rarely more than graffiti these days, are met with overwhelming rejection by the students who have organised vigils to prevent such events recurring - yet in 1988 a black fraternity house, the first on campus, was burnt to the ground before it opened.
Such advances are welcome but irrelevant to the debate on the flag, others say. Jim Giles is a one-man-band who makes a remarkable amount of noise. He spends much of his time in court as his own lawyer, defending what he resolutely believes is his First Amendment right to shout down the press conferences in support of the new flag. The courts have been unsympathetic; his opponents, exasperated.
He accuses Stewart and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, ostensibly on the same side of the argument, of being conciliators, willing to do a deal that will betray the Confederacy. He insists on dismissing as "ignorance" the view of those who identify the flag with slavery. "The US flag flew on the slave ships," he says, "all 13 original colonies were slave states."
"It is arguable that the flag has been misused," he admits of the Klan's activities, which he deplores, "but then so, too, have the US flag, the cross of Jesus, and handguns."
He also argues that the issue is not about race but about remembering the fallen of the Civil War, and yet is easily prompted into a rant against the leadership of the black community and affirmative action.
"The black community has lost the high moral ground," he argues. "They had it when they were campaigning for equality of treatment. Today they are seeking advantage. They have turned away from the ideas of Martin Luther King and are exploiting their `victimhood'. "They are attacking the Confederate flag instead of substantial issues: AIDS, crime, illegitimacy, poverty."
But few in the black community will take his words at face value. Their memories of the campaigns of violence as recently as the 1960s are still fresh. And they can see, stalking in the background behind the Jim Gileses or the Greg Stewarts, the shadowy, nightmare figures from this state's past urging them on. No more than nationalists can disentangle the concept of Orangeism from its supporters, or unionists detach the "real essence" of Republicanism from the campaigns of the IRA.
Both men acknowledge that reality, but assert that they will not be silenced or deflected from the true path by unsavoury supporters. Remember what happened in the "War Between the States", Jim Giles says, "the defensive war we fought on our land, the one million dead, the siege of Vicksburg just 20 minutes from here, where they were forced to eat rats . . ."
Remember Derry.