Time to go: the Confederate battle flag has no place on a Tennessee county seal

A statue honoring Confederate soldiers, dedicated on the Franklin, Tenn., town square in 1899. (Photo: John Partipilo)

I hear from many Tennesseans concerned about the Trump administration’s effort to wind the clock back on equality, tangling with universities over hiring programs and the teaching of America’s brutal history of slavery, and stripping LGBTQ+ military service members of their ranks.

Most recently, President Donald Trump took on the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest grouping of museums, education and research centers, most clustered around the National Mall in Washington, Dwh.C. The Smithsonian is truly one of the country’s treasures. 

On Tuesday, Trump blasted the Smithsonian for exhibits noting “how bad slavery was.” This came amid news that six states, four of which were part of the Confederacy, sent National Guard troops to Washington as part of Trump’s takeover of the capital city. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to rewind history and whitewash the ordeals of Black Americans reek of a pattern or racism, but we have similar efforts to drag us into the past at a much more local level — with the help of the Tennessee General Assembly. 

Williamson County is now in the sixth year of an effort to remove the Confederate flag from the county seal and has been stymied by state lawmakers, who created a new law to ensure the flag of traitors continues to represent Tennessee’s most affluent county. 

Franklin, the county seat, was the site of one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles. On Nov. 30, 1864, six Confederate generals were killed in the Battle of Franklin and according to the American Battlefield Trust, the scale of the Confederate charge rivaling that of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. 

As Civil War battles go, it was a big deal. 

And yet, Tennessee in its 229 year history as a state was part of the Confederacy for only four years. The Confederate battle flag was added to the Williamson County seal in 1968, which was arguably the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a time more than 100 years after the Civil War ended at which Black Americans were still fighting for desegregated facilities and rights equal to those of white Americans. 

I talked with Eric Jacobson, CEO and Chief Historian for the Battle of Franklin Trust. Jacobson’s job is to tell the story of the Franklin battle, the people who were part of it — including enslaved people — and to be a steward for the battlefield properties that draw historians and visitors from around the world. 

“It was put on the seal of this county in 1968, and it was done with as much intent as Georgia putting it on their state flag in 1956 or South Carolina running the flag up at the state capitol in 1961.”

Thus in 2020, a group of residents expressed their concern about having a symbol of the Confederacy represent the county so prominently. 

Confederate group seeks to restrain Williamson County from removing flag from county seal

The group began to jump hoops in the process to get the battle flag removed from the seal. A task force was created and recommended to the Williamson County Commission the seal be changed. The county commission voted to uphold the recommendation, moving to the next step: gaining approval for the flag’s removal from the Tennessee Historical Commission. 

The Historical Commission’s mission is to “care for the proper marking and preservation of battlefields, houses, and other places celebrated in the history of the state.” Fifteen members, all appointed by the governor, voted unanimously in 2022 to allow the flag’s removal, ruling that a seal did not qualify as a memorial to be protected by the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act. 

With that, all should have been well, and the flag should have been stripped from the Williamson County seal and cast into the dustbin of history. 

After years of litigation with the Sons of Confederate Veterans — a Columbia, Tennessee group that has historically promoted white supremacy and been linked with white extremist organizations — the county finally won the case in 2025. But state lawmakers intervened, putting their collective thumb on the scale for the Confederate supporters. 

Sen. Janice Bowling, a Tullahoma Republican, and Rep. Dave Wright, a Knox County Republican, sponsored a measure to override the state Historical Commission. The new law specifically states “the definition of a ‘memorial,’ for purposes of Tennessee heritage protection, an official governmental seal of a city or county government that contains imagery representative of any historic conflict, historic entity, historic event, historic figure, or historic organization.” 

The bill passed 70-24 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate. No Democrats voted for the measure, which Gov. Bill Lee — a Williamson County native — signed into law. 

So the Confederate flag, a symbol of treason and of traitors, remains on the Williamson County seal, a giant public middle finger, a distorted Jim Crow law, not only to Black Tennesseans to but to every Tennessean, regardless of race, for whom the truth of the nation’s savage and disgraceful history is important.