The Augusta County-based singer Scott Miller has a kick-butt song about Sam Houston, who grew up in Rockbridge County and then moved west to play such an instrumental role in Texas becoming independent of Mexico that he got a major city named after him.
When I saw Miller perform in Roanoke a few years ago, he introduced the song “Say Ho” by noting that he occasionally tours in Texas because, as a Virginian, he considered it his duty to check up on the state that Houston and many other Virginians played a role in creating.
By that same measure, I am here today to report that some in Texas seem to have forgotten their own history and heritage.
Bare with me — no, wait, that’s not right. We’re all going to keep our clothes on, but bear with me while I go over some recent political doings in the Lone Star State and how they relate to us.
In 2023, the Texas state legislature passed Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources Act — the READER Act, for short. The intent of the legislation was to shield students from obscene content and is roughly on a par with some of the efforts we’ve seen here in Virginia — such as Appomattox County and Botetourt County, among others — to restrict what’s available to whom. The interpretation of this law led one county last year to remove (temporarily) the Bible from its library shelves on the grounds that some parts of scripture aren’t exactly child-friendly.
In November, the trustees of a school district just outside Houston, the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, voted 5-1 to change the district’s library policies to “align” with the READER Act. The news coverage in Texas at the time focused on how the district was interpreting the act to cover any material that mentions “gender fluidity.”
That is not our topic today. Instead, it’s this: The Texas Freedom to Read Project, a group that thinks the READER Act is silly and misguided, discovered that one of the items removed from the Lamar school district curriculum as a result of the local board’s interpretation of that law was a lesson on the Virginia state flag.
We are indebted to the Axios news site for bringing this to our attention: “The bare breast on Virginia’s flag, a picture of which was included in the lesson, violated the district’s recently adopted ban on any ‘visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity’ in elementary school library material.”
It’s unclear just how many elementary school students in Texas saw our flag and our partially naked emblem. The lesson in question is part of an online database called Pebble Go Next that is used in many schools; the Virginia flag appeared on a page of “Fast Facts” about the state — so it’s not as if every student in a class was forced to stare at our state seal on an old-school projector. But how many viewers that particular page had is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion; the point is, the Virginia flag was there and now it’s gone.
Virginia is obviously not as sensitive about the nudity on its state seal as Texas is. We proudly fly our flag from public buildings — including schools. The General Assembly’s website has a section called “Capitol Classroom” that’s aimed at schoolkids and the seal is right there, smack on the front, in all its partially disrobed glory. There’s even an option to “view larger.”
There are lots of ways to proceed from here. I could write about our culture wars and how those battles over content and curriculum now play out in libraries and schools. I could write about how much classical artwork includes nudity. I would write about how when Ken Cuccinelli was attorney general, he issued lapel pins that depicted a fully covered woman, not the one currently on our flag. I could make all the obvious word play — and then some. Instead, I’ll take a different direction, one that’s aimed at adults more than impressionable Texas schoolchildren. If anybody looks at the Virginia flag and their biggest takeaway is “oh, you’ve got a half-topless woman on your flag,” then they’re missing the point.
The point of the Virginia seal is about tyranny.
A brief history lesson that they probably don’t teach in Texas because I don’t ever remember it being taught in Virginia, either: In Colonial times, the Virginia seal was mostly about our main cash crop, tobacco. The 1714 version showed a partially clothed Native American kneeling before what is likely Queen Anne, the British monarch at the time, and offering her tobacco.
Later versions depicted a male royal figure, presumably representing the Hanoverian kings of which George III was one (the final one for us, but not for Britain).
When the revolution came in 1776, we threw off all symbols of royal authority, including that seal. The Williamsburg judge George Wythe that year did two things of lasting importance: He signed the Declaration of Independence and he designed a new Virginia seal. (The artwork was officially the work of a committee but Wythe did most of the work, just as Thomas Jefferson did with the Declaration of Independence.) Drawing on both Roman mythology and the revolutionary spirit of the day, Wythe designed a seal that showed an Amazonian figure, Virtus, standing over a fallen tyrant. This was propaganda as art, a symbol designed to inspire the citizenry to rise up and fight the king.
This image did not appear on a state flag, however, because Virginia didn’t have an official state flag until 1861 when secession necessitated we fly something other than the Stars and Stripes. Our state flag is essentially a Civil War monument that we today render in nylon. Given our flag’s history, I’m surprised that no one has proposed it be replaced.
Through most of Virginia’s history, Virtus remained fully clothed, even as her depiction changed. Cuccinelli was mocked for his clothed version of Virtus but his version was more in line with Virginia history than the present version is.
The Seal of Virginia in 1865. Courtesy “The Seals of Virginia.” 
The Seal of Virginia in 1894. Courtesy “The Seals of Virginia.” 
The Seal of Virginia in 1851. Courtesy “The Seals of Virginia.” 
The Seal of Virginia in 1875. Courtesy “The Seals of Virginia.” 
The Seal of Virginia in 1904. Courtesy “The Seals of Virginia.”
At some point in the early 1900s, Virtus underwent a possible sex change — there’s some gender fluidity for you. A 1911 report by the State Library Board detailed the history of the state seal. That report said the seal in use around the turn of the century was “lacking, however, in artistic grace and beauty.” It also said that Virtus “has the figure of a man rather than a woman,” which so offended D.Q. Eggleston, the secretary of the commonwealth, that he returned the seal to the engraver “and had the breasts of a woman added to the figure.”
Fun fact: Eggleston was a lawyer from Charlotte County who, during the infamous 1902 state convention that disenfranchised most Black Virginians (and many whites, as well), proposed eliminating most state funding for Black schools. A white supremacist gave us a topless (white) woman on our state flag.
There is a certain historical accuracy to that: Virtus is supposed to be an Amazon and Amazonian women were traditionally depicted with one breast exposed. However, there’s nothing in the elaborate description of the seal in the state code that mandates this.
How state law describes the seal
“The great seal of the Commonwealth shall consist of two metallic discs, two and one-fourth inches in diameter, with an ornamental border one fourth of an inch wide, with such words and figures engraved as follows: On the obverse, Virtus, the genius of the Commonwealth, dressed as an Amazon, resting on a spear in her right hand, point downward, touching the earth; and holding in her left hand, a sheathed sword, or parazonium, pointing upward; her head erect and face upturned; her left foot on the form of Tyranny represented by the prostrate body of a man, with his head to her left, his fallen crown nearby, a broken chain in his left hand, and a scourge in his right. Above the group and within the border conforming therewith, shall be the word “Virginia,” and, in the space below, on a curved line, shall be the motto, “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” On the reverse, shall be placed a group consisting of Libertas, holding a wand and pileus in her right hand; on her right, Aeternitas, with a globe and phoenix in her right hand; on the left of Libertas, Ceres, with a cornucopia in her left hand, and an ear of wheat in her right; over this device, in a curved line, the word ‘Perseverando.'”
That’s a long way of getting to this: Virginia has the most politically charged (and violent) flag of any American state. Alaska has The Big Dipper and the North Star. California has a bear. Mississippi has a magnolia flower. Utah has a beehive. Wyoming has a buffalo. Texas has that lone star. Virginia’s flag shows a woman who has just overthrown a king. Early versions showed that tyrannical king still alive, but the current version is unclear as to his condition. I always thought he was dead, but the state code doesn’t specify that.
Historians may argue over whether King George III was as tyrannical as we’ve been taught. I’m currently reading “The Last King of America” by the British historian Andrew Roberts; he thinks the king was pretty easygoing toward the hot-headed Americans compared to what a real tyrant would have done. Nonetheless, our founders sure felt the king was a tyrant. He (through his elected parliamentarians) imposed taxes we hadn’t voted on — tariffs on imports, to be precise. He restricted what Colonists could make and who they could sell those products to. He started restricting civil liberties once Colonists started protesting those taxes by doing things like dumping imported tea into Boston harbor. He wanted to try American troublemakers in British courts, not their local ones. All that was enough to prompt Colonists to start shooting at Lexington and Concord.
Monday marks the 250th anniversary of one of many events that sparked the American Revolution. On this date, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, saw unrest spreading and wanted to make sure things didn’t get out of hand in Virginia. He ordered British marines to spirit the Colonists’ storehouse out of gunpowder out of Williamsburg and onto a naval vessel bobbing out on the James River. Many Virginians saw this the same way that people today might view a confiscation of guns — an attempt to disarm the citizenry. My school textbooks never mentioned this, but modern histories call attention to what some Virginians at the time said: Plantation owners worried that, without access to that gunpowder, their lives were endangered by the threat of a slave uprising. Our history is a lot more complicated than we were taught in school.
One thing wasn’t complicated, though: Our founders, however imperfect they might have been, wanted to govern themselves and were prepared to die for that right. Two centuries and half of another have passed and the new nation they created still stands. That’s what people ought to be thinking about when they look at the Virginia flag. If Texas can’t teach that lesson, a foundational lesson of American history, maybe we should do as Scott Miller suggested and take the place back.
Want more Virginia history?
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence.
As part of that, I wrote about Lord Dunmore’s seizure of gunpowder from The Magazine in Williamsburg and today we have a story about the restoration of that historical landmark. You can sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter or any of our free newsletters here:
