The yearslong campaign to relocate the University of Mississippi’s Confederate monument succeeded on Thursday as the state board that governs public colleges backed a plan to move the statue from the campus’s main entrance to a cemetery on university grounds.
“The presence of the monument in the heart of our campus has been a subject of debate off and on for a long time,” said Glenn F. Boyce, Mississippi’s chancellor, in a statement. “Now is the time for change as we strive to make a better present and future for everyone on our campus.”
The decision comes as nationwide racial-justice protests have re-energized the push to eliminate offensive symbols and traditions on and near campuses. At some institutions, swift action is replacing years of delays. Public universities in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina all recently announced steps to take down art and move plaques, as well as to change building names or abandon moratoriums on such changes.
The University of Mississippi is also working on creating a memorial to Black Civil War soldiers, according to Boyce’s statement. That project, along with the Confederate statue relocation and other improvements to the campus cemetery, will probably cost between $900,000 and $1.2 million, according to the university, and will be paid for with private money.
The statue of an unnamed Confederate infantryman was vandalized in late May. It has also spurred fresh controversy among students. Some of the university’s football players, backed by their coach, recently pressed for its removal, part of a wider antiracism campaign by student athletes.
“Because of the death of George Floyd and people now becoming very active and protesting, I think that a door has been opened,” said Charles K. Ross, a professor of history and African American studies who has spent decades urging Mississippi to abandon symbols and traditions that alienate Black students, faculty, and staff.
How far that door will open is unclear.
Beyond moving the statue, Ross and some other members of the university community want Mississippi to retire its ubiquitous nickname, “Ole Miss,” a term enslaved people used for the wife of their owner.
Researchers at Mississippi, like their counterparts at many other universities, have devoted substantial energy to investigating the institution’s historical ties to slavery — and what could be done to repair that history. As students return in the fall, university leaders north and south may face renewed pressure to grant financial reparations for slavery and subsequent racial abuses.
“Institutions have to be willing at this point … to pay the price for their histories,” said Stefan M. Bradley, a historian at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, who studies Black-student activism.
The Chronicle on Thursday requested interviews with a representative of the University of Mississippi administration, as well as with the state higher-education commissioner. They declined through representatives.
Mississippi’s Confederate statue, dedicated in 1906, reflects the “lost cause” ideology that valorized Southern secession as a campaign for state’s rights rather than the preservation of slavery. Hundreds of similar memorials were erected in major public spaces from the 1890s on, including at flagship public universities in Texas, Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina.
The University of Mississippi’s efforts to grapple with the white-supremacist history of its statue, including several attempts to contextualize it with explanatory plaques, has spawned years of controversy. That seemed to be headed for a resolution last year, when student leaders undertook a cross-party, multiracial campaign to relocate the monument, which ultimately won the campus administration’s support.
But the board of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, the statewide governing body for colleges, delayed voting on the matter.
The board, in a statement on Thursday, said it had held off in part because it needed more information about the relocation site.
The university pledged to move the statue “as quickly as possible,” but did not offer a specific timeline.
