On September 12, 1920, armed white men abducted a black prisoner from the Clarke County jail in Quitman, Mississippi. The captive, Will Echols, had been transferred from a neighboring county "for safekeeping" after the Mississippi Supreme Court stayed his execution. Convicted of murdering a white night watchman at a local lumber plant, Echols narrowly avoided the gallows when another black convict confessed to the crime. Less than forty-eight hours later, Echols's bullet-riddled corpse hung from a pole alongside a rural highway. Before pumping dozens of rounds into their victim, the mob reportedly shouted, "To Hell with the Supreme Court," and forced Echols to kiss a Confederate battle flag.

... Echols's killers are kindred spirits of Dylann Roof ... Roof's June 2015 shooting spree at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church did not spark the race war he desired, but the tragedy did ignite renewed debate over the links between white supremacy .. and .. the Confederate battle flag ...

... the distance between the Civil War and civil rights is shorter than many realize or care to admit. The decades separating the two "Sixties" of our nation's history reveal that there was never a point at which the flag's meaning and usage could be separated from the white supremacist rebellion that lost the war but won the peace. The Confederate dream of black subjugation by any means necessary lived on in the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and white backlash to the civil rights revolution. White supremacists, like those who abducted and murdered Echols, needed neither a political strategist nor a marketing consultant to rebrand the battle flag. They knew the flag's true meaning ...

... antistatist defiance and racist brutality collided in the lynching of Will Echols. Few of his killers lived long enough to wave a battle flag at a segregationist rally in the 1950s .. but somehow someone knew that it was worth bringing to a lynching in 1920 ... They lived in the wake of the Ku Klux Klan's rebirth, inspired in part by a blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation, that seared Lost Cause mythology into the public consciousness. Thomas Dixon, the North Carolina novelist whose Reconstruction-era tales of dashing Klansmen and marauding Negroes inspired the film, taught Americans that the price of white supremacy was constant violence. When North Carolina state troopers apprehended Dylann Roof in the author's hometown — on Thomas Dixon Boulevard, no less — that bloody legacy came full circle ...

https://www.history.msstate.edu/news/jason-ward-cause-was-never-lost-and-mississippi-state-flag/