Georgia Confederate Specialty License Plate Sees Change

By JUSTIN OVE (Patch Staff)

The State of Georgia and the Sons of Confederate Veterans have reached a compromise on the latter organization’s specialty license plate design that displays the Confederate flag.

The new specialty plate, available as soon as Thursday, will retain the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ logo which features the Confederate battle flag, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. However, the larger Confederate flag that served as a background to the entire plate has been removed.

in June, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal made a public statement expressing his desire to see the plate changed to remove the background flag. In an about-face, Deal had said he would not press for action on the issue only 30 minutes prior to pushing for a change to the license plate.

Deal joined a long line of southern politicians who sought to reduce or eliminate the contentious symbol’s presence in state governments after a self-professed white supremacist hoping to start a race war shot and killed nine black people in a historic church in Charleston; Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the flag an “unnecessarily divisive and hurtful” symbol when he announced his state would no longer issue Confederate flag license plates in the wake of the shooting.

Georgia’s governor told WSB-TV in June that 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.

While other southern states are considering removing the Confederate flag from their state flags or have already removed the flag from their state capitol grounds, 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.

Image: Georgia Department of Revenue