Which best bespeaks Minnesota? Early critics unimpressed.
Citizen design contest settles on six finalists
ST PAUL, Minn. – Nobody much likes the Minnesota state flag that the Legislature adopted in 1957. Legislators backthen unimaginatively slapped the cluttery state seal on a blue field. Even close up it’s hard to distinguish the flag from the flags of at least a dozen other state flags. And it hardly bespeaks anything unique about Minnesota. Then too there are racist and sexist undertones in the seal that went unrecognized in less sensitive yesteryears. In 2023 a right-minded Democratic state legislator, Mike Freiberg of Golden Valley, proposed creating a commission to redesign both the flag and the seal. The legislature concurred. The commission set up a contest for Minnesotans to submit designs. Now the commission has narrowed the search from hundreds of entrees to six and plans to make a final choice by the end of the year. The Legisature, of course, could override the choice. Otherwise the new flag – one of the six finalists– will be flying in May.
State seal on current flag. With Indian riding into the the sunset. Didn’t the state have any pioneering women? Then there’s the French “L’etoile du Norde,’ this more than two centuries after the last French fur-trapper packed up and left. It was a seal and flag for another era.
Freiberg. His idea was to empower a commission to create a new state flag and seal.