With Veterans Day coming up in less than a month, city and county officials are once again planning to temporarily memorialize Black soldiers from Lowndes County who fought and died in World War I, while looking for a solution to memorialize them permanently.
About five years ago, Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science history teacher Chuck Yarborough and his students discovered that the names of at least 12 local Black soldiers had been omitted from the marble WWI monument at the county courthouse.
Mayor Keith Gaskin told The Dispatch Thursday a committee formed to address the matter and talk through options, but the group decided to include more veterans in the conversation before making a permanent choice for the monument.
“These (WWI) veterans should have never been forgotten, and we need to make sure that they never are again,” Gaskin said. “And we’re trying to get it right. On something like this, you want to make sure you get it right.”
In May, Gaskin and Yarborough came up with an idea for a temporary monument – a cardboard sign displaying a QR code listing the names of the forgotten soldiers and a video of MSMS graduate Dylan Wiley’s Black History Month performance in February, which recognizes the omission of the names. The temporary monument was placed in the garden next to Columbus City Hall in anticipation of Memorial Day.
Recently, that marker was removed, Gaskin said, since the city was landscaping and cleaning up the garden area next to City Hall. Once the landscaping is done, a marker for a time capsule that is buried in that spot will be placed in the garden, and the sign will not return, Gaskin said.
“It was never meant to be at City Hall permanently,” Gaskin said. “We just put it up there to make people aware of what we were doing and to honor them.”
But local veterans have been working on putting together a parade for Nov. 9 to celebrate Veterans Day, Gaskin said. The parade will start at the Municipal Complex and end at the county courthouse, where the temporary monument will be displayed next to the currently incomplete monument for the duration of the event.
As far as permanent solutions go, Lowndes County Board of Supervisors President Trip Hairston said he is working on other options for getting the missing names displayed at the monument at the county courthouse. Hairston met with Key Blair with Columbus Marble Works and Yarborough Thursday morning to discuss the issue.
“If you’re going to list names, every name needs to be listed,” Hairston said. “A life given in service to the country is something that is very, very honorable. And not to list a name among those listed is just flat wrong. It needs to be corrected.”
When Blair looked at the monument, Hairston said, he thought taking it apart to add the names may permanently damage it. Instead, Blair recommended an addition to display the names, along with “contextualization” acknowledging that they were not originally included when the monument was constructed.
The addition would be similar to those added to monuments on the University of Mississippi campus, Hairston said, and give the county an economical solution with a quick timeline to get the additional names installed.
The other option, Hairston said, would be to replace the monument entirely – though that option comes with concerns around erasing what’s already there.
Hairston said the committee will ultimately decide which option to pursue, with consideration for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s rules for monument modification.
But Hairston said he’s not worried about MDAH opposing the committee’s efforts to add the names, especially since the monument was first installed in the Magnolia Bowl in 1933 and then placed in storage before it moved to the courthouse lawn in 2015.
Gaskin said the group will gather again soon, possibly in the next week, to talk through options and the potential costs that come with them.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
