Maryland to Recall License Plates Bearing Rebel Flag

BALTIMORE — Confronted with complaints from black leaders, Maryland agreed Thursday to recall 78 special license plates featuring the Confederate battle flag.

“It has become obvious that the logo on the plates is offensive to a large segment of Maryland’s population,” said Motor Vehicle Administrator Ronald Freeland. “We’re not involved in polarizing people.”

The state will offer free regular tags to all members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who were issued the special plates. Members have 60 days to return them, or investigators will confiscate them.

“I’m really outraged over the decision,” said Patrick J. Griffin III, lieutenant commander of the group, one of about 215 nonprofit organizations that have gotten special plates in Maryland.

The motor vehicle agency received its first complaints about the flag last week, even though the plates have been made for nearly two years.

“Symbols are significant and important. Ask a Jewish person about the significance of the swastika,” state Delegate Clarence Mitchell IV, a member of the Legislative Black Caucus, said Wednesday.

Freeland said he would meet with the group’s leaders Friday and the agency would consider a new design for the plates, adding: “Anything that resembles a Confederate battle flag is not going to be acceptable to us.”

From now on, special plates will be subject to approval by a diverse panel of agency employees, he said.

Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans said the organization is dedicated to genealogy and history, is not racist and abhors the activities of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

“What they object to is people who misuse the Confederate flag, and we object to that just as strongly as they do,” Griffin said of the plates’ critics.

Although Maryland, a border state, remained in the Union during the Civil War, it lies below the Mason-Dixon line and was heavily divided in its sympathies. Baltimore was for a time occupied by Union troops to control Confederate sympathizers.

Politicians in several Southern states have dealt with the issue of the rebel flag. In South Carolina last month, the Republican governor upset fellow conservatives when he proposed removing the Confederate battle flag from atop the last Statehouse to fly it.