January 11, 2021
Dear Lafayette County Supervisors and Board of Aldermen:
“I’m an Oxford native,” we like to boast, as if we’re unique creatures rarely seen in the wild.
I grew up eating the Kiddie Special on Saturday mornings at the Holiday Inn and veggie plates at Ruth and Jimmie’s on Sundays after church at the old grocery store in Abbeville. I roamed the Square, curling up in the nook under the stairs in Square Books and reading until my parents retrieved me. I watched Fourth of July fireworks from the cemetery sitting among the headstones when Avent Park was the center of the festivities, and I bought cassette tapes and corn dogs in the Oxford Mall when Walmart wasn’t super and Oxford had a mall. I went to high school in the junior high and junior high where Central Elementary now sits.
My life is scattered in memories all over this place, and the ghosts are everywhere.
So, I understand the fear of change, the desire to hold firm, and how uncomfortable it is to remove the few relics of Oxford’s downtown that predate us. There isn’t much left that looks like it always did, and the Confederate monument carved out of silver-flecked marble has remained immovable even as so much has changed.
But, that doesn’t make it right, clinging to something just because it has always been.
Have you looked at the words on the side of the monument, engraved in stone and intended to speak to generations of us? It screams a lie at us when it says “they gave their lives for a just and holy cause.” What was just and holy about fighting a war over owning people’s bodies?
And have you read the words that say “united in this justification of their fathers’ faith”? Faith in what? What are we justifying? These do not sound like words intending to honor the fallen in a war, but they do sound like words that establish a rationale of exclusion, as was the motive of Confederate monument-building in the early 20th century.
That monument is a lightning rod for controversy, an impediment to the business community, and an ugly reminder of a hateful time in our state’s history when Mississippi’s white elite erected statues as it dismantled the rights of its black neighbors. That monument is a marker of divisiveness in a welcoming downtown Square, and it is an embarrassment to an otherwise progressive community. It offends me to look at that cold marble soldier standing on public property pointing southward, signaling its allegiance to a lost cause, and only the privilege of my skin color enables me to walk past it and ignore it speaking directly to me. So many people I grew up alongside do not share that privilege.
I know well that a tactic for ignoring or downplaying opinions we dislike in Mississippi is to claim the person is an outsider who doesn’t understand how we do things. They don’t have the family connections, the friends, the history, the heritage. This strategy dismisses a difficult conversation before you even hear what a person has to say.
Well, you can’t out Lafayette County me. I am one of you, and I am adding my voice to others in this community who say that the statue does not stand for them. It is exactly because this is my birthplace that I want to remove that symbol that divides — not unites — the people of this community. Oxford is my home, the place where I grew up and where I am raising my family. I refuse to uproot because I don’t like the way the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors makes its decisions. Here I stay, reaching for something better.
What if we considered what might sit in that Confederate soldier’s place, something that tells about the good in this community? We could replace a monument that inspires hate and signals exclusion with something that fills us all with pride. We could choose to symbolize our unity, oneness, and inclusion, and move a relic of the past to a place more fitting for recognizing the violence of a time we want to leave in memory.
It is time to remove the Confederate monument from the Oxford Square.
Sincerely,
Summer Hill Vinson
Publisher of OxfordSpeak & proud Oxford native