As colleges grapple with racist histories, monument at Ole Miss will go
Universities wrestle with addressing racist history
For more than a century, a Confederate monument has towered over the heart of the University of Mississippi, a stark reminder of divisions that have endured long past the Civil War. On Thursday, state officials finally relented: The monument can go.
It won’t go far. The decision allows the monument to be moved from its prominent location to a campus cemetery. But it was celebrated by student leaders, who listened via teleconference to the vote, as another victory in the quest by students and activists across the country to force colleges to confront their racist roots of monuments, school buildings and campus traditions.
At Ole Miss, the statue of a Confederate soldier has been a powerful symbol and a flash point for decades. A riot erupted near the monument in 1962, killing two people, when the first Black student tried to enroll at the state flagship university. Even as the school moved away from many of its traditions over the years — taking down the state flag with the Confederate emblem, replacing its “Colonel Reb” mascot — pro-Confederate groups have rallied around the statue and opponents have vandalized it. The statue is one of the first things people see when they walk onto campus.
It’s also not just at Ole Miss. On Wednesday, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lifted a freeze on changing names on buildings and places on campus. The moratorium had been in place since 2015, after school officials decided to rename Saunders Hall, an academic building named after William Saunders, who was an alumnus, trustee and leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
The University of Nevada at Las Vegas removed the Hey Reb! statue from campus this week, and the university’s president said the future of the school’s mascot is also up for discussion. The mascot for the Rebels has evolved over the years, changing from its earliest incarnation as a wolf in a Confederate uniform. In the 1970s, students voted to drop the Confederate references but maintain the Rebels name. An online petition calling for a new mascot has gotten more than 4,500 digital signatures.
The University of Alabama plans to remove plaques honoring students who served in the Confederate army, and members of the student cadet corps who defended the campus, from their site in front of the university library to a “more appropriate historical setting.” Trustees will also examine building names, school officials said.
At Virginia’s Washington and Lee University, where Robert E. Lee was president after the Civil War and where his tomb is located, school officials have made changes over the years, removing Confederate flags and emphasizing Lee’s contributions as an educator. In 2017, when white supremacists rallied and committed violence in support of a Charlottesville monument, the school’s president, William Dudley, commissioned a group tasked with examining the university’s history. In 2018, Dudley announced that the private university would find ways to tell its history more fully but the name of the school would not change.