House Clerk Andrew Ketchings has etched himself an entry in Mississippi’s history. His admission that he moved the controversial statue of white supremacist Mississippi politician Theodore Bilbo from public display in the state Capitol has earned the normally inconspicuous house clerk a mention in the history books.
Unless House Speaker Philip Gunn is the best actor this side of Sir Lawrence Olivier, he did not play a role in removal from public view of the Bilbo statue.
“I don’t have any idea,” Gunn, sounding earnest, told reporters two weeks ago when asked about the missing statue. “I heard about it at lunch.”
Almost a week later, Ketchings finally confirmed he was the culprit and acted alone — with the aid of movers who received between $4,000 and $5,000 for moving the bronze statue that is reportedly life-size at 5 feet 2 inches tall on an enormous base.
The statue is currently tucked away in a storage room on the first floor of the Capitol, and restoring it to public display could prove troublesome.
To restore it legislators will have to argue that Bilbo should be the only governor memorialized with a statue in the Mississippi Capitol. No other governor has such an honor.
Bilbo, who served two terms as governor and was elected twice to the U.S. Senate, advocated for moving Black Americans to Africa and for opposing anti-lynching laws.
Representing the state that perhaps led the nation in lynchings, Bilbo said in filibustering an anti-lynching bill in the U.S. Senate, “If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.”
Who would be the state legislator to step up and argue that person should be memorialized in Mississippi’s Capitol? Perhaps a legislator could argue about the way the removal was done — with one House staff member doing it on his own.
Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today’s senior capitol reporter, covers politics, government and the Mississippi State Legislature. He can be reached at [email protected].
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