That’s great! I’ve said before that I don’t care at all about your heritage or mine, but this might be a useful way to use heritage to achieve something useful.

I saw this morning that they're moving the Confederate statue at Ole Miss.

As an aside, the article referred to it as "at the entrance" of the campus. I can't see any way to look at the campus map and see that this is true. It is better termed "at the heart" of the campus, in the area called "The Loop" where the buildings stand that were present during the Civil War. Those buildings were used for hospitals, which was the reason the university was not burned when Oxford was. The Loop was also at the center of the 1962 race riots. The statue is a stone's throw from the spot where the quarterback stood on a bench and made a speech that almost prevented the violence. (Well, it would have prevented the student-led violence. Eyewitnesses said that, by nightfall, the students were gone and the rioters were outsiders who likely came from all over north Mississippi and Alabama.) The statue is a few minutes' walk from where both victims' bodies were found the next morning.

In short, the place is fraught.

There have been efforts over the past few years to deal with the statue. A committee that included historians wrote a statement contextualizing it and affixed a plaque bearing the statement to the statue. Controversy erupted over its wording. A second plaque was affixed.

The student government voted more than a year ago to move the statue. The university approved it quickly. The state department of archives approved it unanimously, but the process got stalled with the state-level university governing board. Well, they've finally approved the move.

The confederate soldier is going to be moved to the cemetery where real confederate soldiers lie and, I think, union soldiers, too. It's a pretty spot, but quite out-of-the-way. Students can spend their whole academic careers at the university and never go there. I hope it doesn't become a magnet for protesting bigots.

Let them all rest.

SEC

The Southeastern Conference may change Mississippi.
Football is the religion of the South.

I am very concerned that next people are going to want to knock down all the statues of Cornwallis. A few of my British friends are very much opposed because those statues represent their heritage.

Seems like we should be able to make a distinction between those who are honored despite their sins and those who are honored because of them.

But I don’t think we can.


My prediction is the cancellations in the name of presentism will continue apace along with an increasingly violent backlash.

Destroying art isn't a good road to go down.

There are a lot of broken statues and scribbled-over inscriptions in Egypt that say that our tendency toward iconoclasm isn't new.

I agree with Jon about the difference between fame "because of" and fame "in spite of," but I don't think we're suited as a species to draw that line, at least not during the emotional time when the line is being drawn.

Well, crud.

I just saw some architect's drawings of a proposed plan for the Civil War cemetery at Ole Miss. Someone on Twitter referred to it as an attempt to create a "mini-Arlington for the Confederacy."

The plans show the statue outside the walled cemetery, which is far, far, far smaller than Arlington, obviously, and lovely landscaping for this new shrine. Most disturbing was the parking lot.

I've only been to the cemetery one time. It's tucked behind the basketball coliseum. I'm not sure if there's already a parking lot there now. If there's not, then somebody thinks they're creating a twisted little tourist attraction for unreconstructed bigots.

Using dead people this way, many of them hardly more than children when they died, is just perverse.

In other perverse news, most Mississippians are now in favor of changing the flag to something without the Confederate battle flag, but the governor said something today about a "two-flag solution."

I'm just apoplectic.

quote:

Originally posted by Mary Anna:
Well, crud.

I just saw some architect's drawings of a proposed plan for the Civil War cemetery at Ole Miss. Someone on Twitter referred to it as an attempt to create a "mini-Arlington for the Confederacy."

The plans show the statue outside the walled cemetery, which is far, far, far smaller than Arlington, obviously, and lovely landscaping for this new shrine. Most disturbing was the parking lot.

I've only been to the cemetery one time. It's tucked behind the basketball coliseum. I'm not sure if there's already a parking lot there now. If there's not, then somebody thinks they're creating a twisted little tourist attraction for unreconstructed bigots.

Using dead people this way, many of them hardly more than children when they died, is just perverse.

What disturbs you about the parking lot?

The parking lot means that they are expected people to come.

When I was there, and I have no reason to presume that this has changed, it was just a forgotten, shady quiet place with gravestones within a brick wall.

(I learned yesterday that the gravestones are part of the Lost Cause myth. Nobody knows where the bodies are. I don't know if they know who they are or how many, but maybe. The gravestones were put in later to pretty up a mass grave and make it look like a pretty rural cemetery.)

I don't recall anyone ever going there. I only went there a few years ago, when I was in the area to speak. I thought, "I've heard about that cemetery, but I don't know where it is. Let me find out."

I certainly don't remember anything like visits from the Daughters of the Confederacy (for which I qualify but...no) or the Klan or, these days, a bunch of buffoons in MAGA hats. I think that parking lot in the proposed plan means that the powers-that-be are expecting that and want to encourage it.

I'm going to go look at a campus map and see if the parking lot is new. If it's not, then this part of my post is moot, but the ramifications of the plan to make a memorial park at the cemetery are not.

Found it on Google Maps and Trip Advisor. It is already near the coliseum parking lot, so there's no need to build parking for any visits by the Klan. The landscape design drawing that I saw probably showed a bit of the existing lot.

The earlier article I read about the headstones was wrong. There were individual wooden markers at the time that were lost to time, with rumors that they were removed by a groundskeeper. It is also said that, when the body count got too high, a mass grave was dug in the center.

A few dozen Union soldiers were buried in a separate part of the cemetery and moved to a Union cemetery after the war. There has been some remote sensing done that located about 340 bodies with some records indicating that there might be about 700, but nobody really knows. Some written records exist that give names of some of the dead, and they are engraved on a monument at the site.

TripAdvisor reviews mention having to ask for directions to find it, so it has not suddenly become a tourist draw since I was there in the early teens.

Pardon me while I monologue here.

I just looked through the proposal for the $1,150,000 (!) relocation of the statue and renovation of the cemetery.

It will be done with private funds, which is okay I guess, but to whom is this thing so important that it's worth a million dollars in a state so poor????

Interestingly, the statue is marble. I think most of the DOC monuments were bronze, so I don't think tearing down or moving them means dealing with 40,000 pounds of rock.

The proposal to make a park of the cemetery has apparently been around a while, since there has been time to draw up construction documents. (On a personal note, the construction company is McCarty King. My father had cousins named both McCarty and King. I wonder if I'm kin to these people.)

Everybody, thankfully, doesn't think that this is an awesome idea.
From Twitter:

Us: Move that Confederate monument to a crappy spot behind the now defunct basketball arena, in the back 40 next to commuter parking. It’s the closest MS law will let us get to a dumpster.

@OleMissRebels: But how ‘bout this, tho?

The cemetery now: