‘Home Town’ Reflects an Incomplete Picture of Laurel’s History of Disenfranchisement
Jonathan Odell writes that HGTV home-rehabilitation show “Home Town” sweeps Laurel’s racist past and gentrified present under the rug.
Jonathan Odell writes that HGTV home-rehabilitation show “Home Town” sweeps Laurel’s racist past and gentrified present under the rug.
The protest against Confederate monuments as symbols of racial injustice is not new. It is also not new to Mississippi. As Karen Cox describes in her new book, “No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice,” that protest was front and center in 1966 during the now infamous Meredith March in Mississippi. Here is an excerpt from her book about protests against statues in Grenada, Greenwood and Belzoni during James Meredith’s 1966 “March Against Fear.”
while these keepsakes may seem apolitical, their very circulation enables Confederate myths and symbols to become “normal” features of people’s daily lives.
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.”
‘We want to love this campus just as much as everyone else’: Two top Black student leaders say every stakeholder of the University of Mississippi needs training in diversity, equity and inclusion—and that the administration must start being publicly transparent about both problems and solutions underway.
Arielle Hudson, UM’s first Black woman Rhodes Scholar, says an MFP investigation reveals just how much work on systemic racism the university has yet to do. So far, she writes, the response is inadequate.
Oxonian artist and educator John Rash, along with other artists, wanted to project artistic images on the grounds of the Lafayette County courthouse, as well as onto the Confederate monument that calls the public space home. But the county denied him a permit. Now he’s suing.
Mississippi State University’s campus honors two prominent Confederate leaders, Stephen D. Lee and James Z. George, who helped keep Black Mississippians from voting and students of all races studying revisionist, false history about the Confederacy for generations. Is it time to confront those symbols?
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