Admittedly, I am an ambivalent, moderate, middle-of-the-roader, so I can see both sides to the debate over removal of Confederate statutes and monuments from where they have stood for more than 100 years.
As for the monument at McComb City Hall, I worked for the local newspaper for half a century, and I’ll have to confess I must not be as observant as a reporter should be. I don’t recall ever paying any attention to that monument, even when I was the City Hall reporter during the long hot summer of 1964 civil rights strife. But the monument wasn’t an issue then. African-Americans had far more important matters on their agenda, including equal access to public accommodations, the right to vote and security of their homes.
I visited McComb recently, and from the looks of the downtown area, there appear to be more important challenges now than a little noticed Confederate monument.
With the exception of Centenary United Methodist Church, which finished a renovation project after I left, the heart of the city doesn’t look as good as it did less than two years ago when I moved to Oxford.
But monuments and statues are a hot button issue of this year, and there are some. on the left and the right, who won’t let it go unused.
Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a civil rights icon, who was with Martin Luther King Jr. the day he was assassinated, is not among those African-Americans calling for erasure from public view all semblance of the Confederacy.
National Public Radio reported recently that Young, a former Georgia congressman and ambassador to the United Nations, is defending one of the most dramatic monuments to the Confederacy at Stone Mountain, in northern Georgia. “It's sort of a Confederate Mount Rushmore, with Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis carved into a mountainside,” the NPR piece noted.
“That is a tremendous carving. And I don’t want to see that destroyed. I don’t care who it is,” Young said.
Young is not alone. A recent NPR/PBS News Hour poll found that 44 percent of African-Americans believe Confederate memorials should stay, compared with 40 percent who say they should be removed. Nationwide, 6 in 10 Americans say the monuments should remain.
You can’t change or erase history. It is what is was, although one’s perception of history often is based on what he or she has been told by others, or, unfortunately these days, learned through social media.
For example, the argument is made by some white southerners that the South fought the Civil War for states’ rights, not to preserve slavery. It is true the secession was about states’ rights, but it was mostly the state’s right to allow its white citizens to own black slaves. Mississippi’s official Declaration of Causes for seceding from the United States says in part:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
So those who complain that the Confederate heroes memorialized in those statues fought to preserve slavery are correct. But so, too, are those on the other side who contend the statues and memorials are part of our heritage.
The solution, if there is one, may be to “contextualize” them, like they did at the statue of the Confederate soldier on the campus of Ole Miss. Some, especially those at seats of government, probably should be moved to other places.
But, as I said, I’m ambivalent.
Charlie Dunagin is retired as the publisher of The Enterprise-Journal in McComb and now lives in Oxford. Email him at cdunagin@enterprise-journal.com.
