Confederate monument won’t be removed in Harrison County after split vote
A Confederate monument will stay on its pedestal outside the Harrison County courthouse.
The Harrison County Board of Supervisors divided 2-2 on the issue at its meeting Monday, and the order to move the monument, introduced by Supervisor Kent Jones, died for lack of a majority.
Supervisors Jones and Beverly Martin voted to move the monument, while Rebecca Powers and Marlin Ladner voted to leave it standing. Board president Connie Rocko was absent due to illness that is not COVID-related, said county spokesperson Jeff Clark.
Martin delivered nuanced, personal remarks before casting her vote to move the monument. She said her grandmother belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which erected the monument in 1911, and that the statue honors the Daughters’ loved ones killed in a war “they had absolutely no control over.”
“I feel like this statue most likely does not belong in a courthouse, because this courthouse should be bipartisan and should be a place of justice for all, and since we don’t have other monuments that are honoring any other people who’ve died in other wars... I feel in my heart that we probably should move it,” she continued.
Jones, the county’s only Black supervisor, said he respected the Daughters’ purpose but agreed with Martin that the monument belonged elsewhere. He proposed Finley Cemetery, owned by the county, as a new location for the monument.
“We don’t have to get into a discussion of the Civil War,” Jones said. “We don’t have to get into who was right, who was wrong.”
Neither Powers nor Ladner spoke on the issue before casting their votes.
‘No one is trying to erase history’
The move caps months of debate over the future of the monument and its true significance. Since June, local activists have accused the board of stalling, and defenders of the monument, including members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, have urged supervisors to keep it in place.
Two constituents on opposite sides of the issue addressed the board before their vote Monday.
Wallace Mason, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who also spoke on the issue at a meeting in July, said that moving the monument would be a capitulation to “the counterculture” including “anarchists and Black Lives Matter.”
“Every time you take away a piece of history, you take away somebody’s freedom, and that’s the whole bottom line with taking away monuments,” he said.
Jeffrey Hulum III, a Gulfport nonprofit leader who organized two protests at the monument this summer, said that as a combat veteran, he respects devotion to a cause, even that of the Confederacy.
“No one is trying to erase history,” he said.
But the statue doesn’t belong at the courthouse, he argued.
“If something affects one person in this county, it affects everybody,” he said.
Harrison County joins four other Mississippi county boards of supervisors that have considered moving their Confederate monuments and decided to leave them in place. All of those boards are majority-white, while four of the five boards that have so far chosen to move their monuments are comprised of mostly Black members.
Since 1911
The monument was erected in 1911 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with financial support from the Harrison County Board of Supervisors. At the time, the Daughters were raising money to build similar monuments across the South. The ideology they championed, the Lost Cause, presented the Confederacy as noble and just, and argued that slavery had been a benevolent institution.
According to an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the year 1911 was the peak of the Confederate memorial movement in the United States, with more monuments erected that year than any other.
Historians say the monument-building push was part of a white southern backlash to the new political and economic freedoms Black Americans won in the years following the Civil War.
“Not only does that period from 1890 to World War I have all the monuments erected ... it’s also the time period that had the highest number of lynchings and the imposition of segregation laws,” Douglas Bristol, a historian at the University of Southern Mississippi, told the Sun Herald earlier this year. “These things are all of a piece.”
In June, Jones introduced a resolution asking the board to look into moving the monument.
The monument, tucked between a parking lot and a parking garage, became the site of two tense protests this summer: one in June, shortly after Jones’s resolution, and one in early September, after months had passed with no action by the board. Monument defenders, including Sons of Confederate Veterans, attended both and arranged themselves at the base of the statue.
There were moments of earnest dialogue, as well as shouted interruptions of the speakers arguing for the monument’s removal.
“I’m asking that it be removed before somebody comes to deface it or tear it down,” John Whitfield, pastor of Gulfport’s Morning Star Baptist Church, said in his remarks in September. “So I’m calling on you, the Harrison County Board of Supervisors, to do what you are constitutionally bound to do, place this on the agenda, and take a vote up or down.”
At both protests, members of each side carried and occasionally displayed firearms.
In September, the white nationalist militia group the Southern Defense Force came to the protest with guns and a leashed dog.
Meanwhile, board attorney Tim Holleman, who had been authorized to search for a potential “more suitable location” for the statue, should he had been unable to find one, had the board voted to remove. State law says localities can remove war monuments only if they identify such a location, though at least one other Mississippi county took a vote to remove their monument and then found a new place for it with the help of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
At the Board of Supervisors meeting on Monday last week, Jones asked that a resolution requiring the board to vote on the monument be added to the agenda. Board President Connie Rocko suggested there was no need for such a vote because they haven’t found a new location. Beauvoir and several cemeteries in the county had refused to accept it.
“If you can’t move it, if you have no place to put it, why vote to move it?” she said.
“I would like to have the board’s perspective on what they want to do,” Jones responded. “If we vote to remove it, [when] we find a more appropriate location, then a more appropriate location will be looked at.”
What happens next?
In an interview last week, Jones told the Sun Herald he was hoping to enter 2021 with a resolution of the issue.
But a complete resolution may still be far away.
Opposition to the monument’s location on public ground, outside the seat of justice and site of voter registration in Harrison County, shows no signs of disappearing.
After the vote on Monday, Hulum said he was “stunned” by the outcome and plans to continue advocating for the monument’s removal from courthouse grounds in 2021.
He is considering legal action, perhaps similar to a case brought in Louisiana that argued the presence of a Confederate monument outside a courthouse kept a Black defendant from equal access to justice. The attorney in that case, Niles Haymer, is a Gulfport native who spoke at the protest Hulum organized in June.
Hulum noted that the Harrison County board’s vote matched that of almost every other majority-white board that has considered action on their Confederate monuments.
“They want to show they’re still in control,” Hulum said. “It’s still about racism.”
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 10:40 AM.
