The Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning approved the Confederate monument relocation on the Ole Miss campus Thursday, ending — other than the actual move — a lengthy pursuit to place the much-debated relic in its new permanent home at the Confederate cemetery on the edge of campus.
The monument has been in its current location since 1906 and should be relocated within the next month to what can’t be argued is a more suitable location.
A clear majority celebrated the move, seemed to come without much drama until the renderings of the new location were released. They show the monument in the center of a brick path on a manicured landscape surrounded by in-ground lighting with a bench and headstones in the cemetery in the distance. Currently, the graves are unmarked. The illustration also shows wide-open spaces around the area instead of the tree-lined property as it currently exists.
This set off a social media firestorm, calling the new area a “shrine” for the Confederacy and members of the Ole Miss community, including professors and alumni, criticized the university for glorifying the monument in its new location.
There are several different items to consider when evaluating the plan and the artist illustration or rendering. Let’s tackle them one at a time.
The cemetery has been largely unmaintained compared to campus standards which is a separate but connected issue. Cemeteries should be maintained and cared for, without exception. That the university has allowed the cemetery to be unkempt compared to the rest of campus is kind of odd. And, in its current state, the cemetery wouldn’t meet the standards set by the Mississippi Department of History and Archives or the IHL board of trustees for relocating the monument. Whether it should or shouldn’t is a different argument, but it currently doesn’t.
The deciding bodies wouldn’t have approved a plan to simply move the monument to the area without landscaping and maintenance improvements. The neglected property would have been a non-starter. So arguing about landscaping and maintenance is a moot point because it’s literally required to get this done. You can argue the rules shouldn’t be so stringent, and you can argue the necessity of each small item in the improvements, but if the state flag situation tells us anything, law changes and rules adjustments aren’t exactly the easiest things to change around here.
The plans show a lit, brick path to the monument. A new marker will also be placed in the cemetery to “recognize the men from Lafayette County who served in the Union Army as part of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.” Cameras will be installed around the cemetery to allow UPD to monitor it.
Also, the private money funding the project isn’t taken from elsewhere. It's allocated for this relocation or it doesn’t exist. The money earmarked isn’t for debate regarding its use. Some question whether private money should be able to dictate areas of a public campus, but this is back to the pragmatic argument: given all the entities involved, it was likely this or nothing.
It’s an unofficial rendering. There’s no way the actual finished product is going to look exactly like this, as we’ve seen with every other university rendering in the last two decades. It’s an artistic representation used in the proposal submitted to the IHL but it’s not meant for public scrutiny as far as a plan other than the walkway and lights that were mentioned in the proposal. I was told today the statue isn’t even in the correct place in the rendering. It should be on the other side, as it is in a black and white rudimentary rendering that the university had last fall.
Also, this is Ole Miss. Everything is landscaped to the best possible presentation. They discuss it on student tours and it’s one of the school’s top acclaim mentions nationally. It’s more stunning they hadn’t done more to keep the cemetery up in the past. It’s not glorifying a monument to cut the grass and plant some shrubs around a cemetery. I will say the rendering shouldn’t have had people in it. It presented a connotation unnecessarily that it’s going to be some highly-trafficked visitor area. It’s a mostly unvisited area now except for sporadic gatherings by the — I think — Sons of Confederate Veterans. I highly doubt this changes that much. It’s possible it will be more noticeable whenever Tad Smith Coliseum is demolished, but that’s expensive and it’s not close to happening. The university is getting a lot of use from the building currently.
Some Ole Miss stakeholders have referred to the plan to put up headstones in the cemetery around the unmarked graves as a “mini-Arlington” for the Confederacy. As I mentioned above, I believe in the upkeep of all cemeteries. Final resting places are significant, regardless of occupants.
But even beyond that, this step is actually something presented by the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Contextualization from June 2017. You can read the entire document here.
That group, in their words worked to “introduce the past to the present,” giving the university instruction on how to contextualize and benefit the campus as far as areas, monuments and building names, among other items.
On page 37 of the document linked, the committee recommended “the placement of headstones for the Confederate dead in the University’s Cemetery to recognize their sacrifice, and the placement of an appropriate marker to recognize the men from Lafayette County who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.”
That’s the process, according to the proposal, that’s set to occur in addition to the monument relocation.
The members of the committee recommending the addition of headstones and markers are the following from the document.
Yesterday, I spoke with Anne Twitty, a history professor on campus who has been critical of the rendering on social media, and she told me she was planning to go on sabbatical and then on sabbatical during this portion of the committee’s work and only saw it during the final editing process.
At the time I’m not sure anyone realized how lively these meetings were regarding contextualization. Lexington, Miss., attorney Don Barrett was the proponent for the headstones and other minority opinions within the contextualization committee. The headstone portion of the work was brought up and passed in March 2017 when at least Twitty and then-Winter Institute academic director Jennifer Stollman weren’t present at the meeting.
This excerpt except from the New York Times in August 2017, shows frustration from Barrett’s side, as well.
Hovering over deliberations was the fact that descendants of some of the historical figures remain in Mississippi. Don Barrett, a lawyer from Lexington, Miss., who called himself the representative of conservative alumni on the committee, described a series of compromises and called his fellow committee members, some of them faculty, “liberal as hell.”
“We struggled for months,” he said.
Twitty told me she regrets going along with the headstone addition when signing the final report but at the time was being a team player. She also thinks it's a false equivalency to automatically see the plans now as a direct support of the contextualization efforts because the monument wasn’t at all in the scope of their conversations three years ago. She's frustrated the headstones are likely only for aesthetic purposes because archaeological work is necessary to determine body counts, and even that isn’t foolproof because it detects ground disturbance more than actual, current resting places. Union troops were exhumed and moved to a national cemetery in the years following the war, and some Confederate soldiers were exhumed so they could be buried in family plots.
There are spray paint markers in the cemetery, so it appears some type of survey was done recently or is in the process of completion, but I have no idea of the exact purpose.
In short a segment of students, faculty and alumni who fought for the relocation feel misled by the artist illustration and plans. They interpreted the move to be with the cemetery remaining at least somewhat in its current condition. I understand the basic point, but I can’t get on board with it pragmatically. As I said above, so much of this was necessary to get the votes and meet the law to move the thing. Glenn Boyce, and whoever else, did an excellent job whipping votes between January in June because Mississippi was set for a black eye if Tom Duff hadn't stalled in January. The IHL would have voted “no” to the relocation. So, if an artist rendering helped get that done, so be it. I’ll be stunned if the final result looks halfway like that. Also, remember, as noted above, the rendering looks wide open. There are trees everywhere around that property. They aren't cutting all the trees down. In a perfect world, the Lyceum would have been open with the process, but I've spent a lot of the last year reporting on the IHL and how things move through the system. I can't for sure say it wasn't necessary to achieve an end result.
I do believe it’s important to correctly identify as much as possible, and that’s a concern as everything is being moved to this area. For someone visiting the cemetery without any prior knowledge of all the movements to this point, the experience may be confusing, honestly. There’s a Confederate cemetery which also held Union troops but doesn’t now, and the Confederate graves are unmarked and to some extent unidentified but there are headstones that may or may not mark graves. There will be a marker for the United States Colored Troops but none of those troops are buried there. There’s the 1906 Confederate monument that was first constructed to honor and remember the Confederacy and the 2016 contextualization work will be there, as well. I don’t know what the best answer is, but I don’t think the university can claim it as a teaching area. It all would be somewhat confusing for me, and I have delved into it for hours.
Also, I found out yesterday that the “free speech zones” on campus have been removed, as schools around the country are eliminating free speech zones for first-amendment purposes. Instead, free speech is possible throughout campus as long as it follows a set of rules. The relevant paragraph to this situation, in my opinion, is this:
No free speech or expressive activity may: (i) block any entrance, exit, doorway or passage way, (ii) impede or interfere with the University’s ability to hold classes, (iii) substantially disrupt University operations or business, classroom instruction, student-led study, laboratory work or research, (iv) obstruct pedestrian, bicycle or vehicular traffic, (v) substantially disrupt any university sponsored or recognized event or (vi) vandalize, damage, deface or destroy University property.
The actual cemetery is likely off limits to stand on because, well, that’s obvious, but judging by the rules, the area in general would be open for protests and gatherings because it is out of the way and doesn’t disrupt anything. This is still an improvement because, especially for the years Tad Smith remains standing, the area is on the edge of campus where no one would even notice it except for news coverage. The key though is to enforce the rules when protests or gatherings do break the set rules.
The university plans to move the monument within the next month. Like with most things around here, it’s never simple, but it’s a big step and it happened in a pragmatic way that was necessary to satisfy the strange ways of the IHL and Mississippi law. Working within parameters, regardless of how crazy the parameters are, is required to accomplish things — especially in Mississippi.
The monument has been in its current location since 1906 and should be relocated within the next month to what can’t be argued is a more suitable location.
A clear majority celebrated the move, seemed to come without much drama until the renderings of the new location were released. They show the monument in the center of a brick path on a manicured landscape surrounded by in-ground lighting with a bench and headstones in the cemetery in the distance. Currently, the graves are unmarked. The illustration also shows wide-open spaces around the area instead of the tree-lined property as it currently exists.
This set off a social media firestorm, calling the new area a “shrine” for the Confederacy and members of the Ole Miss community, including professors and alumni, criticized the university for glorifying the monument in its new location.
There are several different items to consider when evaluating the plan and the artist illustration or rendering. Let’s tackle them one at a time.
The cemetery has been largely unmaintained compared to campus standards which is a separate but connected issue. Cemeteries should be maintained and cared for, without exception. That the university has allowed the cemetery to be unkempt compared to the rest of campus is kind of odd. And, in its current state, the cemetery wouldn’t meet the standards set by the Mississippi Department of History and Archives or the IHL board of trustees for relocating the monument. Whether it should or shouldn’t is a different argument, but it currently doesn’t.
The deciding bodies wouldn’t have approved a plan to simply move the monument to the area without landscaping and maintenance improvements. The neglected property would have been a non-starter. So arguing about landscaping and maintenance is a moot point because it’s literally required to get this done. You can argue the rules shouldn’t be so stringent, and you can argue the necessity of each small item in the improvements, but if the state flag situation tells us anything, law changes and rules adjustments aren’t exactly the easiest things to change around here.
The plans show a lit, brick path to the monument. A new marker will also be placed in the cemetery to “recognize the men from Lafayette County who served in the Union Army as part of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.” Cameras will be installed around the cemetery to allow UPD to monitor it.
Also, the private money funding the project isn’t taken from elsewhere. It's allocated for this relocation or it doesn’t exist. The money earmarked isn’t for debate regarding its use. Some question whether private money should be able to dictate areas of a public campus, but this is back to the pragmatic argument: given all the entities involved, it was likely this or nothing.
It’s an unofficial rendering. There’s no way the actual finished product is going to look exactly like this, as we’ve seen with every other university rendering in the last two decades. It’s an artistic representation used in the proposal submitted to the IHL but it’s not meant for public scrutiny as far as a plan other than the walkway and lights that were mentioned in the proposal. I was told today the statue isn’t even in the correct place in the rendering. It should be on the other side, as it is in a black and white rudimentary rendering that the university had last fall.
Also, this is Ole Miss. Everything is landscaped to the best possible presentation. They discuss it on student tours and it’s one of the school’s top acclaim mentions nationally. It’s more stunning they hadn’t done more to keep the cemetery up in the past. It’s not glorifying a monument to cut the grass and plant some shrubs around a cemetery. I will say the rendering shouldn’t have had people in it. It presented a connotation unnecessarily that it’s going to be some highly-trafficked visitor area. It’s a mostly unvisited area now except for sporadic gatherings by the — I think — Sons of Confederate Veterans. I highly doubt this changes that much. It’s possible it will be more noticeable whenever Tad Smith Coliseum is demolished, but that’s expensive and it’s not close to happening. The university is getting a lot of use from the building currently.
Some Ole Miss stakeholders have referred to the plan to put up headstones in the cemetery around the unmarked graves as a “mini-Arlington” for the Confederacy. As I mentioned above, I believe in the upkeep of all cemeteries. Final resting places are significant, regardless of occupants.
But even beyond that, this step is actually something presented by the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Contextualization from June 2017. You can read the entire document here.
That group, in their words worked to “introduce the past to the present,” giving the university instruction on how to contextualize and benefit the campus as far as areas, monuments and building names, among other items.
On page 37 of the document linked, the committee recommended “the placement of headstones for the Confederate dead in the University’s Cemetery to recognize their sacrifice, and the placement of an appropriate marker to recognize the men from Lafayette County who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.”
That’s the process, according to the proposal, that’s set to occur in addition to the monument relocation.
The members of the committee recommending the addition of headstones and markers are the following from the document.
Yesterday, I spoke with Anne Twitty, a history professor on campus who has been critical of the rendering on social media, and she told me she was planning to go on sabbatical and then on sabbatical during this portion of the committee’s work and only saw it during the final editing process.
At the time I’m not sure anyone realized how lively these meetings were regarding contextualization. Lexington, Miss., attorney Don Barrett was the proponent for the headstones and other minority opinions within the contextualization committee. The headstone portion of the work was brought up and passed in March 2017 when at least Twitty and then-Winter Institute academic director Jennifer Stollman weren’t present at the meeting.
This excerpt except from the New York Times in August 2017, shows frustration from Barrett’s side, as well.
Hovering over deliberations was the fact that descendants of some of the historical figures remain in Mississippi. Don Barrett, a lawyer from Lexington, Miss., who called himself the representative of conservative alumni on the committee, described a series of compromises and called his fellow committee members, some of them faculty, “liberal as hell.”
“We struggled for months,” he said.
Twitty told me she regrets going along with the headstone addition when signing the final report but at the time was being a team player. She also thinks it's a false equivalency to automatically see the plans now as a direct support of the contextualization efforts because the monument wasn’t at all in the scope of their conversations three years ago. She's frustrated the headstones are likely only for aesthetic purposes because archaeological work is necessary to determine body counts, and even that isn’t foolproof because it detects ground disturbance more than actual, current resting places. Union troops were exhumed and moved to a national cemetery in the years following the war, and some Confederate soldiers were exhumed so they could be buried in family plots.
There are spray paint markers in the cemetery, so it appears some type of survey was done recently or is in the process of completion, but I have no idea of the exact purpose.
In short a segment of students, faculty and alumni who fought for the relocation feel misled by the artist illustration and plans. They interpreted the move to be with the cemetery remaining at least somewhat in its current condition. I understand the basic point, but I can’t get on board with it pragmatically. As I said above, so much of this was necessary to get the votes and meet the law to move the thing. Glenn Boyce, and whoever else, did an excellent job whipping votes between January in June because Mississippi was set for a black eye if Tom Duff hadn't stalled in January. The IHL would have voted “no” to the relocation. So, if an artist rendering helped get that done, so be it. I’ll be stunned if the final result looks halfway like that. Also, remember, as noted above, the rendering looks wide open. There are trees everywhere around that property. They aren't cutting all the trees down. In a perfect world, the Lyceum would have been open with the process, but I've spent a lot of the last year reporting on the IHL and how things move through the system. I can't for sure say it wasn't necessary to achieve an end result.
I do believe it’s important to correctly identify as much as possible, and that’s a concern as everything is being moved to this area. For someone visiting the cemetery without any prior knowledge of all the movements to this point, the experience may be confusing, honestly. There’s a Confederate cemetery which also held Union troops but doesn’t now, and the Confederate graves are unmarked and to some extent unidentified but there are headstones that may or may not mark graves. There will be a marker for the United States Colored Troops but none of those troops are buried there. There’s the 1906 Confederate monument that was first constructed to honor and remember the Confederacy and the 2016 contextualization work will be there, as well. I don’t know what the best answer is, but I don’t think the university can claim it as a teaching area. It all would be somewhat confusing for me, and I have delved into it for hours.
Also, I found out yesterday that the “free speech zones” on campus have been removed, as schools around the country are eliminating free speech zones for first-amendment purposes. Instead, free speech is possible throughout campus as long as it follows a set of rules. The relevant paragraph to this situation, in my opinion, is this:
No free speech or expressive activity may: (i) block any entrance, exit, doorway or passage way, (ii) impede or interfere with the University’s ability to hold classes, (iii) substantially disrupt University operations or business, classroom instruction, student-led study, laboratory work or research, (iv) obstruct pedestrian, bicycle or vehicular traffic, (v) substantially disrupt any university sponsored or recognized event or (vi) vandalize, damage, deface or destroy University property.
The actual cemetery is likely off limits to stand on because, well, that’s obvious, but judging by the rules, the area in general would be open for protests and gatherings because it is out of the way and doesn’t disrupt anything. This is still an improvement because, especially for the years Tad Smith remains standing, the area is on the edge of campus where no one would even notice it except for news coverage. The key though is to enforce the rules when protests or gatherings do break the set rules.
The university plans to move the monument within the next month. Like with most things around here, it’s never simple, but it’s a big step and it happened in a pragmatic way that was necessary to satisfy the strange ways of the IHL and Mississippi law. Working within parameters, regardless of how crazy the parameters are, is required to accomplish things — especially in Mississippi.
Last edited:
