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Friend, Jeremiah Treece was filled with pride after he was chosen along with other youth leaders to attend City Council meetings in Montgomery, Alabama, and learn how to craft legislation. It was the latest step on a path of achievement the teenager had embarked on years earlier, following a deeply personal encounter with injustice that sparked his interest in public service and politics. But soon after Treece, now 17, settled into the council chamber last spring to observe his first meeting, his pride turned to dismay. There on the dais – behind the first Black mayor of the Black-majority city known as the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement – was a flag thick with Confederate symbolism. It wasn’t a flag that Treece had noticed before. He discovered, though, that it has been the standard of his city since 1952, when the city was seething with racial tensions that three years later spurred the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott. Like other such standards embraced throughout the South for decades after the Civil War, the flag is unmistakable in its meaning. One half the gray of Confederate army uniforms and one half red for the state of Alabama, it is bisected with seven white stars on a blue background running diagonally from top to bottom. According to an explanatory plaque posted in City Hall by the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce, the stars symbolize the seven founding states of the Confederacy, “wreathed in glory and honor” by a gold laurel superimposed above them. Now Treece, a senior at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, is leading a movement to retire the flag he says demonstrates not glory and honor, but hatred. An online petition he posted Sept. 15, “Change the Flag. Grow From History,” has garnered nearly 1,400 signatures to date. This week, Treece took his campaign to change the flag to the Montgomery City Council, proposing at a work session that the city sponsor a competition for high school students to come up with a new design for the city’s standard. The council appears inclined to consider the idea, moving after Treece’s presentation to take it up in committee for possible action by the full body. Gesturing at the flag in the council chambers as he spoke, Treece, who is Black, said, “Looking at that flag serves as a constant reminder not just of … divisions, but of a time when people like me simply weren’t wanted here.”
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