In Mississippi, county courthouses generally have two common features: A clock tower and a Confederate monument.
Both tell you what time it really is.
Saturday morning, word began to spread that the Confederate monument that has, depending on your view, adorned or desecrated the southwest corner of the Lowndes County courthouse grounds for the past 109 years was being disassembled.
A steady trickle of curious visitors stood along the cordoned-off area of the courthouse grounds and Second Avenue, where section-by-section, the 32-foot monument was taken apart and loaded onto a flat-bed trailer.
A solitary woman, a Confederate battle flag draped across her shoulders, spent hours observing the work, which began at 5:30 a.m., but aside from her, those who gathered to watch the proceedings appeared to attach little emotion to the scene. Most stood by for a few minutes, maybe as much as a half-hour, before drifting off to pursue the pleasant diversions of a postcard perfect Saturday. A few snapped photos to record the moment for Facebook post posterity. A Black man who appeared to be in his 20s, noticed the work as he drove north on Fifth Street and, pointing a finger out of his rolled-down car window, shouted, “Take that (expletive) down!” as he passed.
Columbus Marble Works general manager Key Blair was on the scene, supervising the work of about 10 men as they carefully cut and removed sections of the monument.
More than a century earlier, the same company erected the monument, using dozens of men, mules and block-and-tackles. Saturday, the work was performed with two bucket trucks and a towering, 275-ton crane.
Technology was not the only contrast between the erection of the monument and its removal.
At 11 a.m., on August 9, 1912, a crowd estimated at “more than a thousand” gathered for the unveiling of the monument with considerable fanfare.
The Columbus Commercial reported the entire 500-man Mississippi National Guard, which had gathered at nearby Camp Brewer for its annual encampment, marched down Main Street, turned north on Market Street (now Fifth Street) to the courthouse. Mississippi’s Governor, Earl Leroy Brewer was the primary speaker, a speech followed by the playing of “Dixie” by the 17th Infantry Band.
Saturday, the mood seemed more a sigh of relief than celebration.
The first parts of the monument to be removed were the three marble confederate soldiers. By chance, they were loaded onto the flatbed with their faces pointed toward the huge crane, almost as if they were watching the work with fixed gazes in stoney silence.
For more than 100 years, the soldiers had stood sentry on the monument as a reminder of the white supremacy of a defiant South. Since last July, when a confluence of racially-charged local and national incidents finally pricked the conscience of our community, we have waited and watched for what transpired Saturday.
By the end of the weekend, only the naked earth where the monument stood for all those years will remain as any visible reminder. The monument will be relocated to Friendship Cemetery at a place among the dead.
In culture, time is not measured by minutes and days, but by decades and generations.
In a year’s time, we have rid ourselves of a state flag that was an advertisement for racism and a monument that glorified oppression and honored a lost cause that very much deserved to be lost and uncelebrated.
Yet it is one thing to discard the symbols of racism and inequality and altogether another thing to purge the human heart of those sentiments. That hard work remains unfinished and left, no doubt, to future generations to complete.
But what happened Saturday on the grounds of the courthouse is not without significance. It is a message that our community has taken an important step in that journey to equality and unity.
When people drop by the courthouse now, they’ll know what time it is by the peals of the clock tower, not the sight of a monument that has for far too long tied us to a tragic past.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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