Without fanfare, Mississippi marks 33 years of Confederate heritage months
When Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed a proclamation on April 17, 2026, declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi, it was highlighted in a Facebook post by the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the organization that requested it.
The governor kept the document off his own verified Facebook page, which regularly carries his proclamations in full. His office issued no announcement of the signing. The same silent distribution has attended each of Reeves’s Confederate Heritage Month proclamations since 2020, with SCV camp pages serving as the public venue. The 2026 document is the seventh Reeves has issued and the latest Mississippi has seen across 33 years, a practice that began in 1993 under Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice and has been continued by every Mississippi governor since.
Fordice was Mississippi’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Elected in 1991 and sworn in the following January, he came to office in a state whose Republican Party had been rebuilt over the previous two decades on the foundations of white Democratic defection after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and he spent his two terms resisting the cultural and institutional consequences of that civil rights revolution. He was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor organization to the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and 1960s (the name of which was later changed to the Citizens’ Councils of America), and he publicly defended the group when its ties to national Republican figures drew scandal in the late 1990s. Fordice also publicly defended the Mississippi state flag, which at the time carried the Confederate battle emblem in its canton, and he opposed efforts to change it.
In April 1993, a few months into his first term, Fordice signed the first Confederate Heritage Month proclamation at the request of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, and the Order of the Confederate Rose. The language of that first proclamation established the template that has governed nearly most proclamations since. The Civil War appears as a generalized tragedy of American soil. The Confederacy appears without its cause. The commemoration is offered in the vocabulary of heritage, reflection and lessons learned, with no reference to slavery or to the political order the Confederacy was founded to defend.
Fordice’s successor, Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, continued the practice during his single term from 2000 to 2004, issuing proclamations in language closely modeled on the Fordice originals. Musgrove later said that the proclamations are something that should not continue in today’s world, that he could not say why the practice started, and that he should not have signed them. Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, whose two terms ran from January 2004 through January 2012, signed a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation every year he held office. Barbour’s proclamations drew national attention in December 2010 when his defense of the practice was joined by public remarks to The Weekly Standard in which he described the White Citizens’ Council of his Yazoo City youth as a benign civic force--remarks he later walked back under national criticism. Phil Bryant, who succeeded Barbour and served from 2012 through 2020, signed proclamations in each of his first seven years and skipped the practice in 2019, his final year, substituting a Month of Unity proclamation requested by a Christian organization.
Reeves, who succeeded Bryant, has signed the proclamation every April he has been in office. His first, in April 2020, came three months before he signed the legislation retiring the Confederate battle emblem from the Mississippi state flag, and at that flag-bill signing he said it was fashionable in some quarters to say our ancestors were all evil, a notion he rejected, and that he likewise rejected what he called the mobs tearing down statues of our history, including Confederate monuments. The flag came down. The proclamations have continued. The 2026 document is Reeves’s seventh and his last, given that he is term-limited and cannot seek another four years in January 2028.
The 2026 proclamation uses language nearly identical to the ones that Reeves has signed every April since 2020. It opens by naming April as the month the American Civil War began between the Confederate and Union armies in 1861 (it is also the month the war ended in Confederate defeat), affirms that the last Monday of April is, by state law, Confederate Memorial Day, a legal holiday “to honor those who served in the Confederacy,” then delivers its substantive commemorative passage. “As we honor all who lost their lives in this war,” the proclamation reads, “it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us.” The mistakes and successes are not described in the text. The word “Confederacy” appears three times, always in the vocabulary of honor or heritage, with no reference to slavery or to racism in any clause of the document.
The organizations that requested the proclamation in 1993 have continued to request it every year since. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has been its principal sponsor, is the largest of the organizations that emerged from the United Confederate Veterans network of the late 19th century, and its historical project has been the promotion of Lost Cause ideology, a revisionist account of the Civil War that describes Confederate states’ secession as a defense of states’ rights and constitutional principle rather than as the defense of slavery that the secession ordinances of the 11 Confederate states identified, in their own language, as the cause. Mississippi’s secession declaration of January 1861 stated that the state’s position was thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world, and that a blow at slavery would be a blow at commerce and civilization. The declaration was adopted by a convention of elected delegates and transmitted under the seal of the state.
The public infrastructure supporting the practice has shifted substantially across the 33 years since Fordice signed the first proclamation. The state flag is gone. Some Confederate monuments have been relocated. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum stands adjacent to the Museum of Mississippi History in downtown Jackson. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History no longer operates a Confederate museum at the Old Capitol. The Council of Conservative Citizens has receded as a public force in state Republican politics, though its membership rolls once included elected officials and candidates across the South. The proclamation has persisted through these changes, reissued each April by the governor of the moment at the request of the same organization.
The distribution practice stands in visible contrast to Reeves’s handling of other state proclamations. On Sept. 29, 2024, he posted a full image of his proclamation declaring that day Mississippi Veterans of Foreign Wars Day to his Facebook page, along with a note in his own voice asking Mississippians to join him in thanking veterans for their selfless sacrifice. His page carries similar posts for proclamations commemorating bill signings, agency announcements, state holidays and military observances. The seven Confederate Heritage Month proclamations Reeves has signed since 2020 have reached that same audience through the Facebook pages of Sons of Confederate Veterans camps, with the document itself signed under the Great Seal of the State of Mississippi and circulated by the Mississippi Division of the SCV.
Mississippi remains the state with the highest proportion of Black residents in the United States, approximately 38 percent by the most recent census estimates, and the Confederate Heritage Month proclamation is issued on behalf of the entire state by a governor elected by all of its voters. The 2026 version was signed on April 17, made public on the Facebook page of the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans on the same day or shortly thereafter, and entered the public record through news reporting rather than through any announcement by the governor’s office. It remains to be seen whether Reeves’s successor as governor will continue the practice.
Seven Southern states have at various points designated April as Confederate Heritage or Confederate History Month through gubernatorial proclamations, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. Most have quietly discontinued the practice.
Virginia’s last proclamation was issued by Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2010 and drew national condemnation when it omitted any reference to slavery, after which McDonnell apologized and added language acknowledging slavery as the war’s central cause. Georgia’s Sonny Perdue continued the practice through the end of his term in 2011, and subsequent Georgia governors have not resumed it. Alabama’s 2010 proclamation under Bob Riley, in contrast to the Mississippi pattern, explicitly stated that slavery was among the causes of the war, an issue in the war, ended by the war, and thereby condemned. Alabama’s current governor, Kay Ivey, has not issued a Confederate History Month proclamation during her tenure. Texas enacted its recognition as a 1999 Senate resolution rather than through annual gubernatorial action.
Mississippi is now the only state whose governor continues, in 2026, to issue an annual Confederate commemoration proclamation that ignores slavery as the cause of the rebellion it commemorates.
Confederate memorial statue, Port Gibson, March 2026 (Alan Huffman)
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