Starkville’s Unity Park will start accepting nominations Tuesday for individuals who have worked for civil rights for the Black community in Oktibbeha County.
Founded in 2013, the park is dedicated to recognizing individuals and events that advanced civil rights both locally and nationally. Honorees include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Douglas L. Conner, former Gov. William Winter, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Wilson Ashford Sr., Adelaide Jeanette Elliott and the Mississippi State University’s “Game of Change” with Loyola-Chicago.
In 2018, the park began adding plaques annually to recognize Oktibbeha County civil rights activists. The 2020 honorees were Dorothy Bishop, the first female president of the Oktibbeha County NAACP, and Carole McReynolds Davis, an artist and a member of the first local race relations team in the 1990s. Both died in 2014, when Bishop was 71 and Davis was 72.
To be honored at Unity Park, a person must have lived in Oktibbeha County for at least part of his or her life, been deceased for at least five years, “advanced community unity” and “made a significant contribution to civil rights in Oktibbeha County,” according to the park’s website.
The Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors will choose two of the nominees to be honored in January 2021 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Unity Park is even more significant to the community in light of the reignited national conversation about racial justice this year, said Jeanne Marszalek, chair of the Unity Park Advisory Committee. She called the park “a symbol of what can be done” to advance racial justice locally and nationally.
The park has been the site of two local protests: one in June that drew thousands of attendees in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis policeman, and one Friday by roughly 80 Mississippi State University football players boycotting practice in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, who is Black, by white police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“I think they felt comfortable there because they looked behind them at the wall of honor and could see all these people that worked for the very rights that we have today, and I think it inspires people to work for more rights,” Marszalek said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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