(Headline USA) A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910—a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Charles Latham, Grenada’s first black mayor in two decades seemed determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believed the city was violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square, who was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield said lamented that the symbolic cancel-culture gesture had not come with a more purposeful reprogramming effort to force engagement between those who viewed it as erasing history and those who claimed it was a daily reminder of white supremacy—despite being dismantled by a black mayor.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Latham claimed the monument had been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” he said.
“But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there,” he continued. “There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city claims it received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required.
But Rep. Stacey Hobgood–Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site that it decided upon was inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative.
She said the Ladies Cemetery Association was willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century—a period of reconciliation between the North and South following the end of Reconstruction. Many of the Civil War veterans were dying off and groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to preserve their legacy and that of soldiers who lost their lives in the brutal four-year conflict.
Concurrently, the rapid changes brought about by industrialization helped to effect a romanticized sentimentality about the antebellum South that largely shifted the focus away from slavery and emphasized the “Lost Cause” as the South’s struggle to preserve its more agrarian way of living.
In reality, most of those who fought and died in the Civil War were not wealthy, slaveholding landowners and did view the central cause of the war as being one of Northern encroachment following acts of domestic violent extremism like the Bloody Kansas raid by abolitionist John Brown. But at least where the articles of secession were concerned, slavery was one of the primary causes listed.
Grenada’s monument included images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a civil-rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black community leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus.
In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Some of the efforts to raze Confederate monuments in the South—particularly in the moblike frenzy that followed Floyd’s death—have not gone over smoothly.
Clashes turned violent at times in cities like Durham, N.C., and Richmond, Va.—the later of which, the best known capital of the Confederacy, saw some of the most prominent Confederate statues removed from its eponymous Monument Avenue.
The most notorious of all clashes came three years before Floyd’s death, 70 miles northwest of Richmond in Charlottesville.
An effort by far-left city officials to remove bronze statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson drew national attention in the historic college town, with right-wing extremist groups (many of whom had been infiltrated by the FBI) converging for the “Unite the Right” rally in peaceful protest.
However, violence ensued after Antifa counterprotesters also arrived with the intention of creating a crisis for the newly elected Trump administration. Left-wing protester Heather Heyer was killed as 21-year-old motorist James Fields attempted to flee the mob that had surrounded his vehicle by plowing into the crowd.
As for Grenada, although the conflict may not have come to blows in the sleepy town, City Council member Lori Chavis noted that it seemed to be a solution in search of a problem.
Since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city,” Chavis said.
She said she supported relocating the monument but worried about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
