Flag of Alabama

How to read it

The flag was adopted by an act of the Legislature on 16 February 1895 (Acts 1895, No. 383), on a bill introduced in the House by J. W. A. Sanford Jr., according to the state’s Official and Statistical Register. The Code of Alabama 1975, § 1-2-5, describes it: the flag “shall be a crimson cross of St. Andrew on a field of white”, its bars no less than six inches (15 cm) broad, running diagonally across the flag from side to side. In heraldry a diagonal cross of this kind is a saltire. The law gives no shade of crimson and no proportions, and does not say whether the flag is square or oblong. Section 1-2-6 has the flag hoisted on the dome of the Capitol while the two houses of the Legislature are in session, and an act of 1923 requires every school paid for in whole or in part from public funds to fly it beside the flag of the United States on every school day.

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Why a crimson cross?

No record explains it, and the state’s own archivists have read it two ways. The Official and Statistical Register of 1979, published by the Department of Archives and History, said that from the law’s description and the drawing submitted with the original bill, the Legislature apparently meant the flag to keep some features of the Confederate battle flag, particularly the St Andrew’s cross, and concluded that the flag should therefore be square.

Steve Murray, the department’s director, told WSFA in June 2020 that there is no clear record of why the Legislature decided in 1895 to create a state flag, only that the bill passed quickly. The idea that it pays homage to the battle flag is supposition made in later years, he said, and a legislature wanting to evoke that flag would have made the design closer to it. He suggested the flag may have been prompted by the Atlanta Exposition later in 1895, where it flew over Alabama’s building.

Telling it from Florida’s and Scotland’s flags

Florida’s flag is also white with a red diagonal cross, but its bars stop at the rim of the state seal in the centre; Alabama’s cross runs unbroken from corner to corner, with nothing on it. Scotland’s flag, the Saltire, is the same St Andrew’s cross in white on a blue field.