Someday, perhaps 40 to 50 years hence, visitors to Friendship Cemetery will happen upon the Confederate monument tucked away in a corner of the property, where it soars 32 feet above the graves of the Civil War dead interred there, and consider it an oddity, and an embarrassing one at that, given the regrettable inscription honoring the “great cause” for which Confederate soldiers laid down their lives.
By then, those visitors are likely to assume that the monument had always been located in the cemetery, which is unfortunate: How the monument wound up at the cemetery is far more interesting than its presence there, It is a quintessentially Southern tale with a touch of Faulknerian humor, imbued with the rich irony of an O Henry short story.
The monument was relocated to the cemetery on Tuesday at a cost of $133,451 to county taxpayers.
The monument was erected on the grounds of the Lowndes County Courthouse in 1912 with great fanfare, but over the next 108 years, it became little more than a part of the courthouse scenery, with only an occasional objection about the message the monument was installed to preserve.
That all changed in the late spring and early summer of 2020, when the murder-by-cop of George Floyd in Minnesota sparked protests across the nation, including in Columbus and Starkville. In Columbus, those racial justice emotions were further fanned when the state’s new Attorney General, Lynn “Let’s Sue China” Fitch, declined to prosecute a former Columbus police officer, a white man named Canyon Boykin, indicted by a grand jury in the shooting death of a young Black man named Ricky Ball.
The protests soon called attention to the presence of Confederate monuments scattered around the South and many began to come down.
This set the stage for the relocation of the monument in Columbus and an ironic twist that sealed the monument’s fate. On June 15, 2020, Leroy Brooks, one of two Black county supervisors, made a motion to remove the monument, a proposal that fell by a 3-2 vote.
The story may well have ended then, with the monument remaining at the courthouse.
The irony is that it isn’t Brooks who will be remembered as the key figure in relocating the monument.
That honor belongs to Harry Sanders, whose comments to a Dispatch reporter shortly after the vote to keep the monument at the courthouse, created a tidal wave of sentiment in the community to have it moved.
Sanders infamously grumbled that Black citizens who were calling for the monument to be moved were proof that Blacks, among all minorities, were the only group to have not “assimilated.”
“You know why?” Sanders said. “In my opinion, they were slaves. And because of that, they didn’t have to go out and earn any money, they didn’t have to do anything. Whoever owned them took care of them, fed them, clothed them, worked them. They became dependent, and that dependency is still there.”
Until that moment, there had been a number of speeches urging for the removal of the monument, to little avail. But Sanders’ comments did what those speeches could not, galvanizing public support for moving the monument. At its next board meeting, supervisors stripped Sanders of his board presidency, then voted unanimously to move the monument.
But where?
That part of the story is something out of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
Everyone agreed there were two major problems with having the monument at its present location. First, it was on public property. Second, it was situated in a highly-traveled area of the city.
The solution: Move it to another public property that just happens to be the most-visited tourist site in the entire county.
You can’t make this stuff up….unless you’re Faulkner or O Henry or you have lived in the South for any amount of time.
The South is a place where everything, it seems, has a story behind it.
How the Confederate monument wound up at Friendship Cemetery is a tale of classic Southern lore.
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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