One Mississippi metropolis grapples with accomplice statue, civil rights previous – Magnolia State Reside

For more than a century, one of the largest and most lavish Confederate monuments in Mississippi has peered across the courthouse lawn in downtown Greenwood, a black majority city with a history of civil rights protests and clashes. Protesters have demonstrated at the foot of the towering pillar with six Confederates – some residents are calling for removal amid a race settlement across the country, while others are calling for the statue to be protected as a piece of history.

Now, after years of debate, a new statue is being erected in Greenwood – one of Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old who was brutally beaten and shot by white men in 1955 just 10 miles from town. The likeness of Till, whose death is still under investigation by federal agencies, will be one of only a handful of African American statues in Mississippi, where dozens of Confederate monuments still dot the landscape in courthouses, town squares, and other prominent locations.

Greenwood is one of hundreds of towns and cities across the country grappling with painful, costly questions: What should be done with these tributes to the Civil War and the Confederate soldiers who fought in it? And what monuments should be erected in their place to represent the community?

In Mississippi, several locations have voted to remove monuments; the few who made it found it expensive, with a $ 1 million bill at the University of Mississippi. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a larger than life figure of General Robert E. Lee was recently carted away in a truck – nearly four years after a deadly racist rally. During the 2020 protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, dozens of Confederate statues fell across the country – many in liberal urban centers while those stood in rural or conservative locations.

But far fewer cities have cemented plans for new tributes or monuments in their place.

In Greenwood, as in many other places, change has taken place slowly.

Leflore County’s Board of Directors voted more than a year ago, in June 2020, to remove the Confederate statue erected in 1913 by the Varina Jefferson Davis Chapter United Daughters of the Confederacy. The board of directors – of which four out of five members are black – determined that the memorial, the most prominent figure of which is former Mississippi Governor and Civil War General Benjamin G. Humphreys, will not be replaced with a piece depicting the civil rights movement or the history of the county honors.

The vote followed years of discussion about what to do with the memorial after a black public school teacher and his father, Troy Brown Jr. and Troy Brown Sr., filed a request to remove a Confederate statue in 2017 and erect a Confederate statue Civil rights monument – one that Till would likely belong to – on the courthouse lawn to “strike a balance”.

But community members continued to push for the removal. The county’s Black Committee members voted 4-0 to remove the statue. The lone white member, Sam Abraham, did not attend the meeting. He later told the Greenwood Commonwealth newspaper that he had voted to keep the Confederate statue.

Board member Reginald Moore voted to move the memorial, saying it “serves as a symbol of intimidation, fear, betrayal, domestic terrorism, slavery and murder”.

Member Robert Collins said the statue did not bother him, but if it caused pain to others it should be removed. Collins was a young boy when Till was killed; He remembered the fear it inflamed in the black community and said that this was a story the community should not forget. But he felt that no other monument should replace it, regardless of its significance or intent.

“The courthouse is owned by the Leflore County people,” he said. “If we remove this memorial, we shouldn’t put a memorial on the Leflore County property.”

But the Confederate statue is still standing, the process has been slowed down by bureaucracy with no concrete plan for its removal.

The board members did not respond to calls from The Associated Press asking for an update. Mississippi Department of Archives and History spokesman Michael Morris said District Attorney Joyce Chiles reached out to her department for advice in November but noted the agency has not heard from her since then.

In April, Democratic Senator David Jordan of Greenwood sparked a conversation about a Till statue in the town of 13,500. He is one of the last local people alive to have participated in the trial for Till’s murderer.

“There are so many heroes to be recognized,” Jordan said of the need for cities to make plans for new monuments when the Confederates are gone. “It’s about getting justice for so many good people who have been mistreated.”

When Till was killed, Jordan was just starting out as a freshman at a historically black college nearby. He and three friends pooled their money to buy enough gas for 25 cents a gallon to drive to the court in Sumner. Jordan recalls how the defendants drank Coca-Cola and laughed with their wives and children in the muggy courtroom – obviously not afraid of conviction.

“They were the heroes, the most respected people,” said Jordan, now 88. “Many said they did the right thing and killed him. They thought Emmett Till was out of place. “

Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi from his Chicago home. He was charged with whistling 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant in a grocery store and making sexual advances. Her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam kidnapped Till from his great-uncle’s house at gunpoint.

Till’s brutalized body, weighed down with a cotton gin fan, was later pulled out of the Tallahatchie River – the same river that claimed Union merchant ship The Star of the West 90 years earlier during the Civil War. The ship is immortalized on the Greenwood memorial with the steering wheel engraved on one side.

Images of Till’s mutilated body in his open coffin testified to the depths of racial hatred in the deep south and inspired civil rights campaigns. Bryant and Milam were acquitted, despite later confessing to the crime in a magazine interview. Both are dead now.

Senator Jordan said it would feel like poetic justice to erect the Till statue in front of the courthouse – the very same place that dogs were placed on black residents trying to register to vote, in a city in the racist citizens’ councils maintained regional headquarters.

“If we can show that change can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” said Jordan.

But the district administration did not move. Collins said in April that it was a “double standard” to allow the Till statue on the courthouse lawn.

“To move one statue and put another up, I wouldn’t be representing all of the people I should be representing if I did,” said Collins, who is Black, during a board meeting.

Jordan was hurt by the decision, especially since the Confederate statue hadn’t moved yet.

“I told them to leave the Emmett Till statue there for 100 years and then you can move it,” he said. “Then it would be balanced. But I don’t understand ‘double standards’. What a double standard? Just give me the same time. “

Finally, late last month, the council unanimously voted for the Till statue to be erected, just not on the courthouse lawn. Instead, the statue will be placed in a park half a mile from the courthouse and the Confederate memorial. The Till tribute will be funded at least in part with $ 150,000 from a loan from state lawmakers, Jordan said, and he plans the bronze statue to be eight feet tall.

He is also optimistic about the location. The park sits on the railroad tracks that once separated where black and white residents lived and worked in segregated Greenwood – the Greenwood Jordan grew up on. He said he hoped the statue’s presence there would unite the community.

Right now, residents on both sides of the problem are frustrated by the lack of a plan from the officials.

Melissa Earnest – a white resident who grew up in Drew 3 miles from the shed where Emmett Till was beaten before he was taken to the Tallahatchie River – wants movement towards deportation and more memorials for civil rights activists whose stories are ignored became .

“It’s a representation of progress,” she said.

Larry McCluney said he thought the statue was a tribute to the Confederate soldiers who died on the battlefield. It’s also for the Till statue – even in the courthouse – as long as the Confederate statue is standing.

“It’s the same thing when I go to the cemetery and knock down one of your family members’ headstones,” said McCluney, a history teacher and commander in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a 30,000-member organization for male descendants of Confederate veterans. “This is how people think of these things: They are removing the only thing I have that I can go to as a family member and remember my ancestors.”

Brown Sr., one of the residents who requested the removal, said Greenwood needed to show the world what it stood for.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t be talking about the Confederation, but we definitely shouldn’t be celebrating it in the sense that we have this statue over the city like we’re proud of it,” Brown said. “This boy’s life – it’s a story worth telling.”