AUSTIN — Just weeks after Gov. Rick Perry expressed opposition to making a Confederate battle flag image available on specialty Texas license plates, his appointees on the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles unanimously rejected the proposal Thursday.

Passions ran high as dozens of Texans, mostly African Americans, told the board that, for them, the Confederate flag represents bondage, brutality and fear, and is a symbol used by hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to promote their ideology.

Texans need to rally around unifying themes, they said. Opponents included ministers and elected officials.

At one point, U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, unfurled a new United States flag, and roughly 200 people attending the hearing quickly stood and recited the pledge of allegiance.

Putting the Confederate flag on state-issued license plates, he and others said, would reopen old, painful wounds and possibly trigger violence.

Long-time Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe and others appealed to the board not to legitimize a symbol that represents such a dark period of American history for so many people.

“This is the wrong thing to do,” Bledsoe told the board. “We don't want others to look at Texas with scorn and ridicule and think that we are a bunch of country bumpkins.”

But the Sons of Confederate Veterans said they simply wanted to commemorate their ancestors who responded to the call of duty and carried the flag with them on Civil War battlefields.

The specialty license plates would raise money for the group that could be used to help restore Civil War-era maps and documents, said Granvel J. Block, the organization's Texas division commander.

The group likely will file a lawsuit “within weeks,” said Block, of Orange.Nine other Southern states have sanctioned the use of Confederate license plates, and Block predicted that Texas, like three others, would win a court ruling to allow the plates.

The Department of Motor Vehicles board deadlocked, 4-4, when the Confederate license application first came up in April.

Texas' governor had remained silent on the controversy until telling reporters in Florida two weeks ago that the state shouldn't put the Confederate battle flag on its license plates.

“That's just a part of history that you don't need to scrape that wound again,” Perry said.

All nine members on the Department of Motor Vehicles board are Perry appointees. None is African American. The board apparently responded to the governor's signal in the unanimous vote, which it took without discussion.

“It was simply the right thing to do,” said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio.

Block said the result was not a surprise considering “all the rhetoric and emotion.”

“We were not the ones scraping old wounds,” he said. “The (opponents) are the ones doing the scraping. We were quietly asking for these plates, and everyone else was doing the hollering — not us.”

Earlier, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who supports the Confederate license plate, suggested that opponents needed “to get a grip.”

But the state's history of lynching and racism makes the flag too divisive for African Americans “to get a grip or to get over it,” the Rev. A. W. Mays, senior pastor at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church in Austin, told board members. “It runs too deep, and it's too serious a matter to be dismissed.”

Patterson, whose agency sponsored the plate application, told the board it would “commemorate the soldiers, not the politicians.”

“What we are doing is dummying down history by saying if it's Southern, it's bad,” Patterson said. “It is not as simple as we try to make it.”

Before the vote, board Chairman Victor Vandergriff of Arlington noted that state law allows the department to reject a specialty license plate that is “potentially objectionable.”