They Tried to Work Across Racial and Party Lines. But Now Students at the U. of Mississippi Want a Confederate Statue Moved.

Dudemanfellabra, Wikimedia

They’re trying to do it politely, not like Silent Sam.

Instead of tearing down their institution’s Confederate statue, as protesters did last year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, student leaders at the University of Mississippi worked across racial and party lines to build support for relocating the icon from the campus’s entrance to a cemetery on university grounds. The student government unanimously supported the plan in March. Governing bodies representing faculty, staff, and graduate students also got on board. So did the university’s interim chancellor, pending the approval of state agencies.

But as the fall semester began this week, troubling signs were emerging. The student newspaper reported last week that the university hadn’t submitted plans for the relocation, even though five months had passed since the administration’s endorsement. A Twitter account named Move Silent Sam warned that the community might tear down the monument. Signs began to appear at its base listing how many days had passed with seemingly no progress since the student vote. Students and the faculty voiced frustration.

“My real sense is we are the last flagship with a Confederate monument,” Anne Twitty, a historian of slavery at Mississippi, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. Her message to university administrators: “What are you waiting for? … If you’ve read the tea leaves, like I think the rest of us have, and have said the moment for these monuments has come to an end, then let’s get on with it.”

On Wednesday afternoon, though, administrators released a statement that seemed designed to defuse the situation. In his first public communication on the matter since March, Mississippi’s interim chancellor, Larry D. Sparks, announced that the university had completed its plan for relocating the statue, after contracting with a firm to help develop that plan in June. It submitted the document to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History on Tuesday, Sparks said. If approved by that agency, he said, the plan would then need to be taken up by the board of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, the statewide governing body for colleges. The statement offered no timeline for how long that process might take.

The statue, of an unnamed Confederate infantryman, stands at the entrance to the campus. It towers 29 feet tall and weighs 40,000 pounds. It was unveiled in 1906, a marble testament to the “lost cause” ideology that sought to ennoble Southern secession as a battle for states’ rights, not the maintenance of slavery.

DaysOfSilence Twitter account

In a message sent to all faculty, staff, and students, Sparks shared an extensive blueprint detailing how the monument would be moved to the “more suitable location” of a campus cemetery. It remains unclear what the chances are that the plan will go from paper to reality. The board that oversees the university is appointed by the state’s governor, a term-limited Republican, Phil Bryant, who belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans “as recently as 2017,” according to a report in Mississippi Today. The Confederate group tried unsuccessfully to revive a lawsuit against the university in 2016 to remove a historical plaque that sought to contextualize the monument, the article said.

Mississippi is one of many universities that have wrestled with how to deal with Confederate symbols on their campuses. Its Confederate statue is one of hundreds of similar monuments that were installed in “spaces of symbolic power” during the 1890s and 1900s, according to a report put together by historians at the university.

The fights over its statue escalated last year, when a group called Students Against Social Injustice staged a protest to remove it. That was followed by a counterdemonstration by neo-Confederate groups opposed to the steps Mississippi has taken to dissociate itself from Confederate history, including removing the Confederate-themed state flag, ditching the Colonel Reb mascot, and ending the longstanding tradition of playing the song “Dixie” at sports events.

Reaction to the administration’s handling of the issue is playing out against the backdrop of another controversy, which erupted over the emergence of a photo of Mississippi fraternity members wielding guns in front of a bullet-riddled memorial sign to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American who was lynched in the state in 1955. The photo spawned a media uproar when ProPublica, in partnership with the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, first published it in July. The university responded by saying it had been alerted to the photo in March, but had declined to punish the students.

Marc Parry writes about scholars and the work they do. Follow him on Twitter @marcparry or email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com.