Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday that he's "not offended at all" by either his state's flag or the Confederate flag, but that ultimately states like South Carolina and his own will have to make the decision about bringing the banners down.
"It is South Carolina's decision, and South Carolina citizens came together," Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman, told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
Watch the video here.
He said that he has seen photos showing Gov. Nikki Haley together with former governors, the state's two U.S. senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, and other lawmakers in making the announcement about a push to rid South Carolina's Statehouse grounds of the flag.
"That's who ought to decide how they're going to decorate their state capitol grounds," said Barbour. "And that's their decision and [it] should be their decision."
He pointed out that Haley, a Republican, was joined by "a number of Democrats, black and white," and "this is a way big changes ought to be made."
About 15 years ago, Barbour said, there was a referendum to change Mississippi's state flag that failed. But "that's going to be talked about again," he said, and it will be up to the state's residents to make the decision.
On Monday night, Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican, called for eliminating the portion of the state flag that contains an image of the Confederate battle flag on it, reports
the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.
"We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us," Gunn said in a statement. "As a Christian, I believe our state's flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed. We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi's flag."
The newspaper said Gunn's call was the first from a Mississippi Republican elected official.
Gov. Phil Bryant said Monday morning that he did not expect the Mississippi legislature to "supersede the will of the people on this issue" and bypass the 2001 referendum, which saw 64 percent of the voters choosing to make the Confederate emblem part of the state's official banner. Bryant spokeswoman Nicole Webb told The Clarion-Ledger that Bryant voted for the emblem.
Barbour told the "Morning Joe" show that it is up to the state government, not him, to offer statements about what should be done with the state or with Confederate flags.
"You know, the last thing a governor wants to hear is the old governor [say] we ought to do so and so," said Barbour.
He also poked fun at a poll taken in Mississippi about six weeks ago, in which 50 percent of the respondents said they'd vote for secession if there would be another war between the states.
"My position is anybody that believes those kind of polls needs to learn more about polling," said Barbour. "I would be very interested in who took such a poll and what the question really was."
But he did point out that while he was governor, "Mississippi became the only state in the country to use state money, taxpayers' money, to build a civil rights museum."
"And when the Freedom Riders of 1961 came to Mississippi in 2011 for their 50th anniversary, we had an event for them at the governor's mansion, at which time I apologized to them for the way that they were treated," said Barbour, "and told them what we were doing with the [Mississippi] Civil Rights Museum, which I think they were very, very proud of."
He also noted that his state has a "higher percentage of its African-American adults registered to vote than in New York, where you're sitting. We're proud of that record. We're proud of the change that's happened in Mississippi in my lifetime."
The museum is being built, said Barbour, "because we want people to see the bad that happened so that it doesn't ever happen again, and we want them to see the progress that we have made. And I saw that same kind of progress in South Carolina."
And, he told the show, the Confederate flag "will be in that museum."
Barbour also talked about the upcoming 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and the book he has written about the experience,
"America's Great Storm: Leading through Hurricane Katrina."
"We made a lot of progress," Barbour said. "If you went down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by and large, if you are not familiar with the coast, most places you wouldn't know anything happened."
There are many homes that were not rebuilt, said Barbour, but "the population on the coast is back to where it was. The schools are great."
Further, Barbour said, the Federal Emergency Management Agency "rightly got a very bad rap for the failure of their logistical system, [but] the federal government did a whole lot more right than wrong by us and that's why I've written a book about Katrina."
The book is not a political biography, he said, but is about "America's great storm" and the help Mississippi got from other states.
"Almost a million volunteers from other states came to Mississippi and registered with different charities or churches," said Barbour. "I think that the worst natural disaster in American history brought out the greatest outpouring of charity, philanthropy and volunteerism in American history."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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