Ole Miss students vote to remove Confederate Flag: 'It has no place here'

The campaign to remove the flag has gathered pace since the shooting deaths of nine church members in Charleston this summer

Students have voted to remove the flag (AP)

Students at the Universe of Mississippi have voted to remove Mississippi flag from campus because it contains a Confederate battle emblem - increasingly derided across the nation as an offensive reminder of segregation and slavery.

Thirty-three student senators voted in favour of a resolution to ask the university to remove the Mississippi flag, which includes the iconic but controversial blue cross and 13 stars. Fifteen students voted against the move.

The vote is non-binding. Yet the vote by students is highly significant and underscores the increasing offensive against the flag, a campaign that has gathered pace since the shooting dead of nine church members in Charleston.

Administrators on the campus of the celebrated university, located in the city of Oxford, will consider it later.

“The Confederate emblem that's on the state flag is deeply connected and rooted in ideas of white supremacy and racial oppression, and that symbol has no place on our campus,” Allen Coon, the student senator who wrote the resolution, told the Associated Press.

“If we claim to respect the dignity of each person, that flag cannot fly on our campus.”

Mr Coon, who is white, said if administrators do not act quickly to remove the flag, student senators will push the Faculty Senate and a governing body for non-faculty university staff members to adopt a similar resolution.

Jeffrey Vitter, who was announced Monday as the state College Board's choice to become the new University of Mississippi chancellor, said he is committed to diversity.

The Mississippi state flag (AP)

"I'm very supportive of what the students are doing this year in terms of talking about the issue of the flag and having that discussion," said Mr Vitter.

Since 1894, the Mississippi flag has had the Confederate battle emblem in the upper left corner - a blue X with 13 white stars, over a field of red. Residents chose to keep the flag during a 2001 statewide vote and supporters of the emblem says it repesents history and heritage.

Yet the fight over the fight has inensifed since the shooting deaths last he black church in South Carolina after it emerged that the suspect, Dylan Roof, who has been charge with nine counts of murder, had posted images of himself with the banner on the internet. Along with a racist “manifesto”, he also posted images of himself standing in confederate war cemeteries and at the sites of former slave plantations.

More than 200 people took part last Friday in a remove-the-flag rally on the Oxford campus, sponsored by the university chapter of the NAACP.

Dylann Roof pictured on the website that also featured a rambling 'manifesto'

Officials at the University of Mississippi - where the flag became a symbol associated with white supremacy after the college was forced to enrol black students in 1962 - have tried to distance the school from Confederate symbols during the past two decades. Sports teams are still called the Rebels, but the university several years ago retired the Colonel Rebel mascot.

The university also banned sticks in the football stadium nearly 20 years ago, which eliminated most Confederate battle flags that fans carried, said the AP.

Several Mississippi cities and counties have stopped flying the state flag since the Charleston shootings. The state's three historically black universities had stopped flying the flag earlier, and the state's only black U.S. representative, Democrat Bennie Thompson, does not display the state flag in his offices.

Yet the future of the state remains uncertain, particulate so in a year when the governor and most politicians are seeking re-election on November 3.

In August, actor Morgan Freeman, author John Grisham and musician Jimmy Buffett were among more than 60 people who signed a letter, published in the Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, calling on the state to come up with a new flag.

At least three of the state's public universities already do not fly the flag. Prior to the statewide referendum in 2001, Mississippi State University's faculty senate voted to support efforts to change the state flag.

Yet at Tuesday evening vote, there was no shortage of people urging the student senators to protect the state flag.

One student, Andrew Soper, wrote: “Removing symbols, flags and monuments will do nothing to change the way people feel in their hearts.”

He added: “Ole Miss Students and my fellow Mississippians, rise up and push back on political correctness and support the state flag.”