Posted on November 29, 2018

Rebel Flag on Civil Rights Hero’s Grave Gets Widow’s Pardon

Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press, November 28, 2018

The 93-year-old widow of a slain civil rights activist in Mississippi said Wednesday that she forgives the person who draped a Confederate battle flag over her husband’s gravesite.

Ellie Dahmer (DAY’-mur) said her family was told that the black woman who left the flag Tuesday did it as a protest to teach a grandchild about the state’s history, and the bad things the flag represents.

“We were told that she was telling her grandson about that flag — about how much hate was in that Confederate flag,” Dahmer told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Vernon Dahmer is buried in south Mississippi’s Jones County. {snip}

The flag was left on his grave the same day Mississippi voters were deciding a U.S. Senate runoff in which the state’s history of racist violence became a central theme.

Jones County Sheriff Alex Hodge said his office received a call Tuesday morning that a flag and a red noose made of rope or yarn had been left on Vernon Dahmer’s grave. He said investigators found that the items were left by a black woman. Hodge would not release the woman’s identity, saying “she’s a mental patient.” He would not elaborate on her condition.

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Ellie Dahmer told AP that she thinks the woman made “an honest mistake.”

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The battle flag also appears on the upper left corner of the state flag that Mississippi has used since 1894. Voters chose to keep the state flag in a 2001 election, but all of Mississippi’s public universities and several cities and counties have stopped flying it in recent years. {snip}

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