Cop faces off with Confederate flag-wavers then gets fired: report

A Mississippi Capitol Police officer has reportedly lost his job after confronting a group of Confederate flag-waving protesters.

What's the background here?

The protesters were waving Confederate flags and Mississippi state flags outside of the museum. Neither the Confederate nor the state flag are flown outside of the museum or in front of any of Mississippi's major universities, according to the Clarion Ledger.

The Mississippi state flag is the only state flag in the U.S. that bears a Confederate flag in its design and is at the center of an ongoing statewide debate centered on the desire of some to change the state flag because of its Confederate roots.

The Delta Flaggers were present at the museum, waving the flags as a protest of state organizations that refuse to fly the flag.

The Delta Flaggers, according to their Facebook page, is a "dedicated group of citizens from the Mississippi Delta area with the goal of preserving the 1894 flag of Mississippi and defending Southern Heritage."

"The Mississippi Flag regardless of what the voters decide it is should be flown at all institutions that [receive] state funding," the group's description reads.

So what happened in front of the museum?

According to the Clarion Ledger, the unnamed officer approached the group of Delta Flaggers outside the state's new civil rights museum on Saturday.

Facebook user Chris Blount posted the details of the flag-wavers' presence outside of the museum,   writing that this incident wasn't the first of its kind with this particular officer. You can watch the video here.

Blount went on to describe the events that reportedly led up to the officer's ultimate firing.

This is not the first altercation with this officer. This is how it started.

One of our members walked over there to ask [the officer] about taking a group picture with the Civil Rights sign the cop told him hell no and to take his Howdy Doody counterfeit a** back across the street. He told the cop that we had no bad intentions and that we just wanted to take a group picture with the new Museum and he said hell no again you're not going to do it, get back across the road.

That’s when this guy with a state flag went over there to take a picture, and I started recording.

He was the only one with an attitude like that. The rest of the people (even his boss seen in another video) we had no problems with.

In the video where he says something about the grass. That is the first time he said anything about the grass ... and he even steps in it in the video!

1:09 The cop throws up black power.. (someone just pointed it out to me I didn’t see it while taking the video)

The guy that walked over there to start with to ask the cop could he take a picture with the sign has over 13k pictures in his phone, thats what he does, he has pictures from around the south with everything from big watermelons to the Oscar Meyer wiener [sic] truck. it would of [sic] been just another picture in his collection.

State Rep. Kathy Sykes, (D) confirmed the report of the officer's firing with the Clarion Ledger on Tuesday, and said that waving Confederate flags around the museum — which she said African-Americans hold in high regard — is "almost like desecration."