Governor Wants Redesign of Confederate License Plate

Credit: Georgia Department of Revenue

Gov. Nathan Deal is joining a growing list of southern politicians who are trying to cut down on the display of the Confederate flag following a racially-motivated mass shooting in Charleston.

The Georgia governor has proposed changes to the state’s license plates which recognize the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization. Deal tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he would like to remove the large Confederate flag that makes up the background of the entire plate.

Deal’s call to change the plate came just thirty minutes after he publicly announced that he would not press for action on the issue; the governor told reporters that he wanted to make sure that Confederate flag license plates did not become an issue in Georgia.

Governors in other southern states are moving towards an outright removal of Confederate flag license plates; top pols in North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee have expressed support for the discontinuation of what Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said was an “unnecessarily divisive and hurtful” symbol.

Each governor cited the recent Supreme Court decision in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans as a legal groundwork for phasing out the design. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 18 that license plate designs were government speech and therefore less strictly monitored than public speech; if the State of Texas did not want to issue a license plate displaying a Confederate flag, that was their right and not a First Amendment violation.

Deal told WSB-TV he believed that an individual choosing to display such a license plate was a personal matter and very different from flying a Confederate flag on state property or having a state flag which contains a portion of the design.

11 Alive News reported that Deal will speak with representatives of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to work out a compromise on the new design. Deal said he didn’t think the organization would support complete removal of their emblem, which bears a Confederate flag, from the license plate.

While other southern states are considering removing the Confederate flag from their state flags, Deal expressed gratitude that predecessors Roy Barnes and Sonny Perdue fought to have Georgia’s state flag redesigned a decade ago; the Confederate flag was added to Georgia’s state flag in 1956 and was removed in 2003, though Georgia’s state flags have had some resemblance to the Confederate Stars and Bars flag since 1879.