An Ole Miss student was arrested during the University’s football game against the University of Memphis Tigers after brandishing the Mississippi State Flag.
Dylan Wood, a third-year Ole Miss student told Breitbart Texas he was simply enjoying the game when a security officer approached him and said he had to take his mini version of the Mississippi flag from him because it was larger than what the stadium allows.
Wood said he agreed to leave the game and exited the Ole Miss stadium without any issues. Once outside, though, Wood said a security guard told him he would have to agree never to bring the state flag with him to another Ole Miss game or run the risk of being arrested. When Wood asked if he would truly be arrested for carrying the state’s flag, prompting the officer to spin him around and arrest him on the spot, taking him off to the local jail.
Although Wood’s flag was slightly larger than the permitted size, he said the flag issue has never been a problem in the past six years he has been attending Ole Miss football games.
“This was never a problem until Ole Miss stopped playing ‘Dixie,’” Woods told Breitbart Texas.
The University of Mississippi announced back in August that it was bending to politically correct standards and would cease to play “Dixie,” an iconic song for Ole Miss fans, in order to be more “inclusive,” Fox News reported at the time.
Wood said the flag is being targeted by security at Ole Miss games, telling Breitbart Texas that other students had their stickers with the Mississippi state flag on them removed before entering the game.
This is not the first time Ole Miss fans carrying Mississippi pride items have been asked to put their flags and banners away.
Breitbart Texas reported last month how university security confiscated a number of flags and signs which read “Let the band play ‘Dixie.’”
One game attendee who had his sign and flag taken, Mike Espildora, took to his Instagram account, writing “Ole Miss did a great job displaying their pride and was wrongfully and violently shutdown, the fight isn’t over yet,” referring to the broader assault on the state flag by political correctness on college campuses.
A spokesman with the Our State Flag Foundation told Breitbart Texas that it seemed security was specifically targeting Ole Miss fans who support the state flag.
“The University officially says they are targeting because of the ‘size of the banners, not because they are state flags’,” the spokesman said. “This is highly questionable though when you watch the videos, also because they allow big inflatable sharks, big foam fingers and retractable scroll signs sold in the stadium which are much larger than the Dixie and small state flags that were confiscated and targeted.”
Mississippi State University and the Mississippi University for Women have already removed the state flag from their campuses, as a politically correct-charged movement claims the banner promotes a racist ideology dating back to the Confederacy.
John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.