In “Look Away, Look Away,” filmmaker Patrick O’Connor captures the battle to change, or keep, Mississippi’s state flag by turning his lens on Mississippians who made the flag fight their fight. In five years of filming, he came to see the debate as about more than the flag. The story is about identity itself: “It’s about who you think you are,” O’Connor says.
One summer, a sweet white lady really wanted VBS to be inviting for folks outside our church, and she was inspired to give it a ’50s theme. The 1950s. In Montgomery. We objected. She didn’t understand our concern. She wanted fun sock-hops and poodle skirts and was not at all pleased when I asked if we were going to have colored drinking fountains and restrooms.
President Joe Biden is dissolved the 1776 Commission, a group that includes ex-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant. Former President Donald Trump appointed the committee late last year, tasking them with formulating a national plan for “patriotic education.”
Trump’s Lost Cause creates its own brutal trap for those who will not acknowledge that he lost a standard, legal, legitimate election. Good losers aren’t happy about losing, but because they share a devotion to the community, they concede and move forward instead of burning everything down in a frenzied tantrum.
The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors is holding out on both moving the Oxford Confederate statue and memorializing a lynched Black man there because he allegedly killed a white woman.
while these keepsakes may seem apolitical, their very circulation enables Confederate myths and symbols to become “normal” features of people’s daily lives.
A towering Confederate monument will likely continue to stand next to the Forrest County Courthouse in majority-Black Hattiesburg, Miss., after a county-wide referendum to remove it narrowly failed in a 51% to 49% vote.
Current debates around racism confirm that Confederate statues and Christopher Columbus statues, which effectively commemorate white superiority, have expired. What’s a nation to do with expired monuments?
University of Mississippi football players marched in Oxford and others in Tallahatchie County on the 65th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder: “We have to be able to show love even when hate is brought to us. We have to be able to create change where this is no change.”
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