MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Mississippi lawmakers may have voted to take down the state flag which includes the emblem honoring the Confederacy. And counties around the state are relocating Confederate monuments. But in the college town of Oxford, resistance to change is still alive and well.
The five member Lafayette County board of supervisors voted unanimously Monday night to keep a Confederate statue in the heart of the Oxford town square. Members of the all-white and all-male board insisted removing the monument would do nothing to create racial harmony in the county. And one supervisor argued that the statue is not of Robert E. Lee or Nathan Bedford Forest. Rather - it honors soldiers from Lafayette County who never came home from the Civil War.
The optics of Monday night’s vote speak volumes. For one thing, the fact that a county with a nearly 24% African American population is still being governed by all-white supervisors is striking. Plus, that same evening, supervisors in Lowndes and Bolivar counties voted to relocate their Confederate monuments.
Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi – my alma mater – which long ago stopped flying the state flag, and recently moved a Confederate statue from the center of campus.
Clearly, the supervisors don’t get it. Monuments to the confederacy are monuments to slavery and oppression. Let’s not destroy them. But they no longer deserve a prominent place in the public square. And that’s my point of view.