Last night in a resolution passed unanimously (47-0), the Ole Miss Associated Student Body Senate recommended that the Confederate statue be moved from its current location to a less visible one in the Confederate cemetery on campus.
First, let’s recap where we are:
Ole Miss Football Game, 1962
Ole Miss Protest Against School Integration, 1962
Ole Miss Student Body Vote to Remove Confederate Monument, 2019
The resolution is now one step closer to reaching Chancellor Larry Sparks’s desk. I have no doubt that the recent neo-Confederate/white supremacist rally on campus and the response by the school’s basketball team was the nail in the coffin for this resolution.
To be clear the vote to remove the statue, if successful, will result in its relocation to the campus’s cemetery, which is as good as having it removed altogether. Few people will see it and it won’t be such an embarrassment as students testified during last night’s meeting. Teachers and students will still have the opportunity to visit the monument and use it to better understand any number of subject.
I have always maintained that the Confederate monument debate will ultimately be decided by this generation of young adults.
An outhouse would be more apropos, but it’s a step in the right direction: let the dead rest with the dead.
A cemetery sounds like the right place for it. Good for these students.
Relocating it to the cemetery preserves a significant historical artifact that allows the Ole Miss community to reflect on their place in the continually evolving story of Civil War memory and civil rights. I hope the chancellor and the rest of the administration supports their students.