The US Virgin Islands flag, and what it means

The flag as the Virgin Islands Code writes it

The USVI flag is one of the few in the United States whose every color is fixed by statute. Title 1 of the Virgin Islands Code describes it in the language of heraldry, element by element.

Dexter and sinister are the eagle's own right and left, so the laurel hangs on the viewer's left and the arrows on the right, as on the Great Seal. Two sentences close the section, and they are the whole of the Code's color guidance: the blue of the letters and the arrows shall be azure blue, and the blue of the chief of the shield, its upper band, is the blue of the arms and flag of the United States. The Code sets no proportions and no shade for the yellow, so a printed flag and an embroidered one can differ a little and both be right. The common rendering, the one drawn above, is two to three, hoist to fly.

What the eagle, the arrows and the laurel mean

The Code describes and does not explain, so the meanings are the ones Virgin Islanders have given the design for a century, and we say them as that. The eagle and the shield are the arms of the United States, simplified: they say whose territory this is. The three arrows are read as the three main islands, St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, in place of the thirteen the national arms carry for the original states. The laurel is the old emblem of victory, the reading usually given, and the Code is specific that it is laurel, not the olive branch most eyes expect. The V and I stand for Virgin Islands, and nothing in the statute says more.

The tradeoff of borrowing the national arms is that the flag reads as the United States' before it reads as the islands'. The seal the territory adopted in 1991, with the islands themselves on it, is the government's own answer to that.

When the USVI flag was adopted, and by whom

The usual account runs like this. Rear Admiral Sumner Kittelle was sworn in as governor on April 26, 1921, in the years when the Navy ran the islands, and within weeks he asked for a territorial flag. Percival Wilson Sparks, a cartoonist, drew the eagle between the two letters and traced it onto cotton; his wife Grace and her sister Blanche Joseph embroidered the first one. Kittelle adopted it by executive order on May 17, 1921, the date every reference gives and the one the Legislature chose when a Senate committee approved a Virgin Islands Flag Day bill in October 2019.

What we cannot do is show you the order. The Code's section on the flag carries no date, the Flag Day bill is not in the Code's 2025 edition, and the government page that once stated the executive order is no longer online. So: 1921, by the governor's order, on every account we read, and no document of the day we could put in front of you.

The Dannebrog before 1917, and the US flag beside it since

Before the eagle there was the Dannebrog, the white cross on red that Denmark has flown for seven centuries. The islands were the Danish West Indies, and the Danish flag came down for the last time at four in the afternoon on March 31, 1917, the day the territory still keeps as Transfer Day, when the United States took possession under a treaty signed the summer before and paid $25 million in gold. The Stars and Stripes went up in its place, and for four years it was the only flag the islands flew.

It still flies beside the territorial one, and federal law sets the order: under 4 U.S.C. § 7 the flag of the United States takes the highest point of any group, the peak of a shared halyard, and never sits below or to the right of another flag. The Virgin Islands flag flies under or beside it on every public building in the territory, and the governor is who orders it to half-staff; Government House lowered it from sunrise to sunset on June 10, 2026, for a former senator. The Code states no protocol of its own for the territorial flag.

The territory's seal is a different design

Search for the Virgin Islands flag and the seal turns up beside it, and the two are easy to confuse because the seal in use before 1991 was modeled on the Great Seal of the United States, the same eagle in a circle. The seal in use since January 1, 1991, has no eagle at all. The Code describes it in its own section: a yellow breast, the bananaquit that is the territory's official bird, perched on a branch of yellow cedar, the official flower, above three islands, one with a sugar mill for St. Croix, one with the Annaberg ruins for St. John, and one with the Capitol Building for St. Thomas, the flag of the United States and the Dannebrog behind it as they stood on Transfer Day. A scroll reads United in Pride and Hope. The St. Thomas artist Mitch Davis drew it.

The seal is the government's mark, on its stationery and its office doors, and the Code restricts its use. The flag is everyone's.

The British Virgin Islands flag, so you know which is which

A search for the Virgin Islands flag returns two, and they could hardly be more different. The British Virgin Islands, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Jost Van Dyke and Anegada, are a British Overseas Territory and fly a blue ensign: a blue field, the Union Flag in the upper corner at the hoist, and the territory's arms in the fly, St. Ursula in white holding a lamp, eleven more lamps around her on a green shield, and a scroll reading Vigilate, be watchful. The saint and her companions are who Columbus named the islands for; the arms were granted in 1960.

The rule for a traveler is simple. A yellow eagle on white means the American side, where a US citizen needs no passport. A Union Flag in the corner means you have crossed to the British one, where the passport comes out, as the passport and entry guide explains.

Questions about the US Virgin Islands