Flag of Louisiana

How to read it

Louisiana Revised Statutes 49:153 makes the official flag “that flag now in general use”: a solid blue field with the coat of arms of the state, the pelican tearing its breast to feed its young, in white in the centre, and beneath it a white ribbon carrying in blue the motto, “Union, Justice and Confidence”. Act 92 of 2006 added that the pelican must show “an appropriate display of three drops of blood”, and § 49:151 asks the same of the state seal, while forbidding agencies to throw away flags or stationery with the old seal to bring the change about. The law names no shades and no proportions. It has the flag fly from sunrise to sunset over the Capitol, state buildings and institutions, and parish courthouses while the courts sit, and over public schools during school hours. 64 Parishes says the legislature first declared the pelican flag official in 1912, and that the present drawing, by Curtis J. Vann Jr., was made official in 2010. The image is the Pelican in her Piety, also called a vulning pelican.

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Why the flag law asks for three drops of blood

An eighth-grader from Houma, David Joseph Louviere, noticed in 2005 that a flag he owned, which had flown over the Capitol, showed the traditional three drops of blood, while many others, including some flying at the Capitol in Baton Rouge, had none. 64 Parishes puts the bloodless flags down to flag makers saving money. Louviere wrote to his representative a few months after Hurricane Katrina, and testifying the following year he told lawmakers that Louisianans deserved a standard design “especially during a time like this when Louisiana is in recovery”. The new drawing also gave the mother pelican a golden-brown tuft of feathers on her crown, to look more like a brown pelican, the state bird, and wrote the motto without punctuation, “Union Justice Confidence”, though the flag law still words it “Union, Justice and Confidence”.

From ten chicks to three

The pelican goes back to the state’s first seal, after statehood in 1812, when Governor William C. C. Claiborne replaced the bald eagle he had first chosen, most likely to please the state’s Catholics, 64 Parishes says. That seal had ten chicks in the nest. At least half a dozen pelican designs followed on the seal and flag, facing left or right, with anywhere from three to eighteen nestlings, and most looked like the American white pelican, which winters in Louisiana but does not live there all year. The exception was during the Civil War, when the legislature adopted a flag with a yellow star and thirteen stripes.