Washington: The next great First Amendment battleground is just six inches high. It is a license plate bearing the Confederate flag.

Nine states let drivers choose speciality licence plates featuring the flag and honouring the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which says it seeks to celebrate Southern heritage. But Texas refused to allow the group’s plates, saying the flag was offensive.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that decision in Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, No. 14-144, a case that considers the limits of free expression and the meaning of a charged symbol that many associate with secession and slavery.

Texas has hundreds of speciality plates. Many are for college alumni, sports fans and service organisations, but others send messages like “Choose Life,” “God Bless Texas” and “Fight Terrorism.”

The state almost never rejects a proposed design. But the eight members of the board of its motor vehicles department deadlocked in April 2011 over whether to allow one featuring the Confederate flag. By the time the board next considered the question, in November 2011, civil rights groups had mobilised.

“They bused in high school kids,” recalled Granvel Block, a former commander of the heritage group’s Texas division. “They had preachers. It was a circus.”

Among those who spoke up against allowing the Confederate symbol was the Rev. George V. Clark, 82, an African-American minister. “It saddens me,” he told the board, “that the possibility even exists that I might still be driving around the state and frequently see something that represents hate, something that has made people feel less than human.”

The board then voted unanimously to reject the license plate. In the process, it weighed in on a part of Civil War history that continues to reverberate across the nation, from a fraternity at the University of Oklahoma to South Carolina’s state Capitol, 150 years later.

“A significant portion of the public,” the board explained, “associates the Confederate flag with organisations advocating expressions of hate directed toward people or groups that is demeaning to those people or groups.”

The Sons of Confederate Veterans filed a First Amendment challenge, winning in the US. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans. The court said Texas had discriminated against the group’s view that “the Confederate flag is a symbol of sacrifice, independence and Southern heritage.”

Ben Jones, a national spokesman for the group, described its mission. “It’s a heritage organisation,” he said. “It’s not a bunch of racists. It’s a group that longs for reconciliation and progress but will not forget the past.”

Jones, a Democrat who served two terms in Congress representing Georgia, said the Confederate flag “represents the independent spirit of the South, no matter what race you are.”

His group says it has 30,000 members and is open to “any male descendants of any veteran who served honourably in the confederate armed forces.”

“There are black members, Hispanic members, Jewish members and Native American members,” Jones said, adding that he could not provide numbers and doubted that such breakdowns are kept.

Jones, who three decades ago played the mechanic Cooter Davenport in the CBS television series “The Dukes of Hazzard,” said that the Confederate flag had been featured without controversy on top of the General Lee, the orange Dodge Charger featured in the show’s chases and stunts.

Today, the flag appears on license plates in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the Confederate flag has only one fundamental meaning. “It’s a powerful symbol of the oppression of black people,” she said in an interview.

Texas has mounted a vigorous defence of its decision to reject the plates. “Our fundamental right to free speech must be protected, but that right does not include compelling the state of Texas to approve any image on state-issued license plates,” said Cynthia Meyer, a spokeswoman for the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton.

In 2011, not long before the motor vehicles department rejected the plates, Gov. Rick Perry indicated he supported such a move. “We don’t need to be scraping old wounds,” he said.

Civil liberties groups and First Amendment specialists have filed briefs in the Supreme Court supporting the Southern heritage group. The briefs acknowledge that the flag is offensive to many people.

— New York Times News Service