The South has removed over 160 monuments since 2015
After myriad renamings of revered military bases and other institutions, plus the removal of memorials to oft-controversial figures, a similar wave of emotional change is certain to become part of this crusade in the future.
Most of these transformations have occurred in the South where since 2015, more than 160 monuments and memorials connected to the1860s Confederacy have been altered or removed, including some of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The next round of refashions could also originate in the Southern states with the changing-out of monuments to notable people of the past at the National Statuary Hall inside the nation’s capitol building in Washington, D.C. Mississippi could lead the charge.
In February during the early days of the 2024 legislative session, State Rep. Robert Johnson of Natchez and State Sens. Derrick Simmons of Greenville and John Horhn of Jackson initiated moves to remove the current statues in Washington of Mississippians Jefferson Davis, the only President of the Confederacy, and segregationist state lawmaker J.Z. George.
Johnson proposed statues of renowned civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and U.S. Sen. Hiram Revels, the first Black elected to that body, as replacements for Davis and George. Simmons and Horhn suggested special committees to study the issue.
In 1864, Congress asked the states to contribute two statues of prominent citizens for permanent display in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.
Mississippi’s history since statehood in 1817 has primarily been known nationally in the realms of the cultural arts, athletics and Civil Rights. That’s where I would go to select our new honorees for the exhibit if busts of Davis and George are shipped home for storage.
Such an exhibition’s representation should come from subject areas that please a majority of a state’s citizens. I believe that a choice from the arts does that. Athletics would, too, but Civil Rights overrides sports in this case. This is Mississippi, after all.
My choice would be to pair statues of slain Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Eudora Welty.
Raised in Decatur and a World War II veteran, Evers fought racial discrimination at every juncture of his adult life until his death in June 1963 at the hand of assassin Byron de la Beckwith. As head of the state’s NAACP field office, Evers led efforts to desegregate Mississippi’s public schools and to solidify Blacks’ voting rights.
There is a strong and valid connection between Welty and Evers. In a 1963 work that attracted wide recognition about the murder of Evers, she wrote: “Whoever the murderer is, I know him; not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. “That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind.”
The story, titled “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” was published in The New Yorker soon after Byron De La Beckwith’s arrest for the murder of Evers.
Welty, a lifelong Jacksonian, won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1973 novel “The Optimist’s Daughter,” which some critics labeled as part-autobiographical. Welty, who died in 2001 at age 92, wrote five novels and had dozens of short stories published. She also was a photographer of renown.
Longtime Mississippi State University English instructor Noel Polk wrote extensively on Welty’s views on race. Polk said Welty was careful to be “the writer, the artist (who) must remain independent of particular social phenomena, lest her work cease to be art and become propaganda.”
Mississippi could go elsewhere for Statuary Hall replacements, but I don’t see how it could go wrong with this combination.
Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.