Arkansas State Flag

In 1912, the Pine Bluff chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted to present a flag to the newly commissioned USS Arkansas battleship. They contacted Secretary of State Earle E. Hodges to obtain one. Hodges told them Arkansas had no official state flag. He then organized a design contest.

Sixty-five entries came in. Willie Kavanaugh Hocker of Wabbaseka won with a diamond centered on red. The selection committee asked her to add the state name inside the diamond; she agreed and arranged three stars around it — one above, two below. The General Assembly adopted the design on February 26, 1913.

Ten years later, a fourth star was added to represent Arkansas's Confederate membership. The legislature placed it with two stars above and two below the state name. The arrangement was immediately debated. By 1924 — just one year later — the legislature had changed it to three stars below and one above, separating the Confederate star from the others. Governor Bill Clinton codified this final arrangement in 1987.

The diamond makes the most specific claim: Arkansas is the only state where diamonds occur naturally in the ground. Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro — the only publicly accessible diamond mine in North America — sits on the same volcanic formation that was known when Hocker designed the flag. The diamond isn't decorative. It's a geological fact written into the state symbol.

The four stars inside the diamond are doing more historical work than most people notice. Three of them carry three simultaneous meanings: the colonial sovereigns (France, Spain, the United States), the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and Arkansas as the third state carved from that purchase. The fourth star, placed alone above the state name, represents the Confederacy — and it wasn't there in 1913. It was added in 1923, during the same post-WWI wave of Confederate commemoration that shaped symbols across the South. The flag's current form is the result of two separate political decisions made a decade apart.

Arkansas's flag uses Old Glory Red, Old Glory Blue, and white — matching the U.S. flag's colors exactly. Arkansas law defines all three by Cable and Pantone values, making it one of the few states where the flag's exact shades are legally standardized. Manufacturers have no room to interpret the colors.