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Former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour also signed Confederate Heritage Month proclamations every year between 2004 and 2016.

Though Confederate Heritage groups like SCV promote a whitewashed version of the South’s role in the Civil War that has often made its way into textbooks in the state and throughout the country, the historical record makes clear that slavery was the primary cause of the Union’s split and the subsequent Civil War.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” Mississippi’s 1861 Declaration of Secession said. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”

Reeves’ ties to the SCV stretch back long before his time as governor. In 2013, he spoke to the SCV’s national gathering in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in front of a massive Confederate battle flag and in a room decorated with smaller Confederate flags and cotton plants. After then-Lt. Gov. Reeves congratulated the organization for “keeping history for our youth,” speakers defended the Confederate “cause” and compared “Yankees” to German “Nazis” in World War II.

Long before entering politics, Reeves was part of a Millsaps College fraternity known for Confederate-themed parties where members wore blackface and for lionizing Confederate General Robert E. Lee. When it became an issue in his 2019 campaign for governor, though, he said he never participated in blackface during his time in the fraternity.

Reeves’ Democratic opponent at the time, then-Attorney General Jim Hood, was also in a fraternity at the University of Mississippi, where members wore blackface; he similarly denied ever participating.

Reeves Denied Existence of ‘Systemic Racism’

In the decades after the Civil War ended, Confederate veterans, such as Mississippi State University inaugural President Stephen D. Lee, and groups like SCV began the work of remaking history in a way that shone a more favorable light on the South—muddying the waters over the cause of the war and falsely describing it as a “war of northern aggression.”

After the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, Mississippi’s white leaders worked to enshrine white supremacy in state law, adopting a Jim Crow state constitution in 1890 (including a racist felony voter-disenfranchisement provision that remains in state law and continues to disproportionately disenfranchise Black voters). White supremacist leaders in Mississippi renewed efforts to enshrine Confederate heritage in the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

Gov. Phil Bryant spoke at the groundbreaking of Mississippi’s Civil Rights Museum next to the old state flag containing the Confederate battle symbol on Oct. 24, 2013. Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain Jackson civil-rights hero Medgar Evers, is visible (right) below the flow.

Mississippi’s Confederate-themed 1894 state flag flew over state buildings until 2020, when state lawmakers voted to retire and replace it following decades of efforts by Black Mississippians and in the wake of young Black Mississippians leading protests after the murder of George Floyd. Despite his campaign pledge not to use his power to change the flag, Gov. Reeves signed the bill retiring the old flag, calling it “a law to turn a page in Mississippi today.”

“It is fashionable in some quarters to say our ancestors were all evil. I reject that notion. I also reject the elitist worldview that these United States are anything but the greatest nation in the history of mankind. I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history—north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,” the governor said in 2020, criticizing Black Lives Matter protesters from across the country even as he signed the bill. “I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.”

Even though his state had only just removed the emblem of the Confederacy from atop the Capitol building, Reeves continued to deny the lasting effects of the state’s white supremacist history. In 2021, he told Fox News that “there is not systemic racism in America”—contradicting mountains of evidence, including the vestiges of Jim Crow that remain in force in Mississippi law like the state’s 1890 voter disenfranchisement law.

Then, in 2022, Reeves signed a so-called “critical race theory ban” into law, which is a misnomer because, despite its legislative title, the law neither mentions nor describes critical race theory. As he signed the bill, the governor claimed that “critical race theory is running amok,” despite the fact that the lawmakers who drafted it admitted that they did not know of any public K-12 schools where the academic theory is taught.

The Mississippi governor also painted critical race theory, which addresses systemic racial inequalities in the legal system and throughout society, as a tool of indoctrination that is used to “humiliate” white people.

“Children are dragged to the front of the classroom and are coerced to declare themselves as oppressors, that they should feel guilty because of their race, or that they are inherently a victim because of their race,” he said at the time.

Reeves is expected to sign a bill into law by a Thursday, April 24, 2025, deadline that will ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools and universities—curtailing efforts to ensure more hospitable learning environments for everyone regardless of characteristics like race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.

Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves (left) is accompanied by President Donald Trump as he speaks at a rally at BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Miss., Friday, Nov. 1, 2019. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

The governor has praised President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI policies.

“Small homegrown businesses are the lifeblood of our economy. And small business owners all across America are relieved that we have a new administration that is more focused on economic growth than DEI and pronouns,” he wrote in a Facebook post in January.

Mississippi will observe Confederate Memorial Day on April 28, with state and local offices closing to commemorate the men who died fighting in rebellion against the United States in order to preserve the institution of human slavery.

The Mississippi Free Press has reached out to Reeves’ office for comment on this story.

For more on the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “redemption” schemes, and the censorship campaign to romanticize and sanitize the Confederacy in southern and U.S. textbooks, read this in-depth piece about first Mississippi State University President Stephen D. Lee’s successful efforts to rewrite the Confederate narrative.

Disclosure: Former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove has donated to the Mississippi Free Press. This does not affect our coverage.

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