Confederate group dressed in rebel flag garb confronts protesters at Gulfport monument
When Jeffrey Hulum III arrived to set up for the protest he had organized to call for the removal Confederate monument on courthouse grounds, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their supporters were already there.
Hulum organized the Gulfport protest to mark Juneteenth and to call on the Harrison County Board of Supervisors to vote to remove the statue from public land and take it to Beauvoir, the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Earlier this week, Harrison County Supervisor Kent Jones introduced a resolution to try to do just that.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, many dressed in rebel flag carb, said they came to defend the statue erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Board of Supervisors in 1911 because they heard protesters were “coming to tear it down,” according to member C. Findlay. Findlay said he could not recall who had told him this.
As Hulum and his mother pulled into the parking lot before 5 p.m. for the 5:45 p.m. demonstration, the counter-demonstrators were arriving in cars, trucks and motorcycles decorated with United States flags, Mississippi state flags and rebel flags. Hulum said his first thought was, “It’s a good day in the state of Mississippi.”
“We gotta do this collectively as a body,” he said. Because they were there, he said, the counter-demonstrators would have to listen to the arguments in favor of moving the monument.
About two dozen supporters of the monument, who were nearly all white, arranged themselves around the base of the 25-foot statue. They faced about 60 people, most of whom were Black, who had come to call for the monument’s removal.
During speeches about the meaning of the monument to Black Americans and the significance of its location on public land, a few of the counter-demonstrators, like 42-year-old Greg Hester of Saucier, shouted interruptions.
“You’re lying!” was a common refrain.
The interruptions, Hulum said, were “music to my ears — that let’s us know they’re listening.”
When Hulum took the microphone, he said that he was prepared to personally protect the monument from damage.
“We want it done the legal way,” he said.
The demonstrators’ chants of “Take it down!” were met with the refrain “Lest we forget” from the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their supporters.
As speaker Niles Haymer was introduced as a lawyer from Baton Rouge, one counter-demonstrator shouted, “Why is he here? He’s not even from here.”
Haymer grew up in Gulfport before moving to Louisiana for college and law school. In 2019, Haymer represented a defendant who challenged the location of his trial because a Confederate statue stood outside the courthouse. Haymer argued that that the monument meant his client, who was Black, felt he wouldn’t get a fair trial. He appealed the case went all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court before it was dismissed.
In an interview with the Sun Herald, Haymer said he was optimistic that the Harrison County statue would come down.
“It’s moving faster than I ever thought it would move,” he said.
Earlier this week, the Louisiana parish that is home to the monument he challenged in court announced that it will hold a vote on removing the statue.
One roadblock to removing the Gulfport statue is a Mississippi law preventing the alteration or removal of monuments to “the War Between the States” unless a “more suitable location” is found. While Hulum and other speakers argue that Beauvoir, owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, is such a location, Findlay disagreed. He said that moving the statue constituted “reverse discrimination” and “Black supremacy.”
“It doesn’t belong there,” he said. “It belongs right here.”
When the speeches ended, many of the demonstrators and Sons of Confederate Veterans stuck around and debated each other on the 1894 state flag, the monument, and the causes of the Civil War.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 8:10 PM.
