MSMississippi State Symbols

The magnolia does more work in Mississippi than any symbol does in most states. Schoolchildren voted it the favourite flower in 1900, the legislature made the magnolia tree official in 1938 after a second vote of students, the blossom was confirmed as state flower in 1952, the nickname Magnolia State follows from both, and since 2021 a single magnolia bloom has been the centrepiece of the state flag. One plant covers five separate designations.

Official state symbols

What is on the Mississippi state flag

Mississippi flies the newest state flag in the country after Minnesota. The field is navy blue with a red bar edged in gold at the hoist and another at the fly. In the centre sits a white magnolia blossom, encircled by twenty white five-pointed stars because Mississippi entered the Union as the twentieth state. Above the blossom is a single gold five-pointed star, placed there to honour the Choctaw, Chickasaw and other Indigenous peoples of Mississippi, and it uses a diamond-cut style drawn from Native design. The words "In God We Trust" run in gold beneath the flower.

The flag it replaced had flown since 1894 and carried the Confederate battle emblem in its canton, the last state flag in the country to do so. The legislature voted to retire it in June 2020, a nine-member commission ran a public design process, and voters approved the magnolia design at the November 2020 general election. Governor Tate Reeves signed it into law on 11 January 2021.

The state seal and the state song

The Great Seal of Mississippi shows a bald eagle with an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of arrows in the other, a direct borrowing from the national arms that dates to the state's first years. In 2014 the legislature added the words "In God We Trust" to the seal, and that phrase later carried across to the flag design, since the 2020 law required any new flag to include it.

"Go, Mississippi," made state song in 1962, has an unusual origin. Its tune was lifted from "Roll With Ross," a campaign song written for Governor Ross Barnett, with new words replacing the political ones. Few states sing a repurposed campaign jingle at official events.

Symbols that surprise people

• The teddy bear is the state toy. Adopted in 2002, it traces to Theodore Roosevelt's 1902 hunt near Onward, where he refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree. The refusal became a cartoon, and the cartoon became the toy.
• Two mammals, land and water. Mississippi named the white-tailed deer its land mammal and the bottlenose dolphin its water mammal on the same 1974 slate, so the Gulf coast got its own species.
• The state fossil is a whale. The 1981 designation covers Basilosaurus and Zygorhiza, serpentine early whales whose bones turn up in Mississippi's Eocene clay well inland from today's coast.
• The state stone is wood. Petrified wood, named in 1976, comes chiefly from the Mississippi Petrified Forest at Flora, a stand of stone logs washed there by an ancient river.
• An official oyster shell. The 1974 shell designation reflects the Gulf oyster industry around Biloxi and Pass Christian.

Symbols of bordering states

Explore further