McComb’s city board gave the go-ahead to remove a 104-year-old monument to Confederate soldiers from the grounds of City Hall years ago, but it’s sat there since due to a lack of funds.
Since city funds can’t be used to remove the monument, officials voted to set up an account for donations for the job.
“I don’t know how successful we are going to be gathering donations, but we are going to try our best. We are going to get it moved by the end of our term,” said Selectman Ronnie Brock, who proposed establishing the account. “We just want to relocate it to a more appropriate place. Where it is now, it is a constantly divisive stone.”
The monument was built and dedicated in 1916 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to honor Confederate soldiers in the area who fought in the Civil War.
McComb’s monument joins other tributes to the Confederacy located throughout the South that have been targeted for removal amid social upheaval over racial injustice.
They were put up around the turn of the 20th century, when Civil War veterans were dying in droves, as part of what historians call the Lost Cause, a narrative that justified the Civil War from the perspective of Confederate states, downplaying the role of slavery.
“We are reaching out to everyone in an effort to show good faith that we are not trying to hide or destroy it,” Brock said of the monument. “We are going to move the monument. But in an effort to calm everyone's nerves, we want assistance to move it as safely as possible.”
The monument was originally approved to be moved off of the Third Street entrance of city hall during former Mayor Whitney Rawlings’s administration in August 2017.
Brock, who was on the board at the time, said the city got a $31,000 estimate to remove the monument at the time, so that is the goal for the account.
“The city has grown to a point to where the majority of the citizens have the right say-so and representation to speak for them, and they want the monument moved,” he said, noting that the city’s population is 72% Black.
Brock said the city has not received any donations yet, but he believes the effort will pick up steam soon.
Donations may be mailed to City Hall or dropped off in person, but Brock said the donation has to be specified to go to the monument relocation account.
The city board voted 3-2 last week to open the account, with Brock and selectmen Devante Johnson and Shawn Williams voting in favor and selectmen Michael Cameron and Ted Tullos against it.
“I am a student of history. I enjoy studying history. I don’t see why history needs to be removed,” Tullos said. “I am just not for destroying history. ... You just don't do that.”
State law prevents war memorials and statues from being removed, disturbed or rededicated, but there is a provision that says they can be relocated if the governing body moves them to a “more suitable location if it is determined that location is more appropriate to displaying the monument.”
Tullos noted an attorney general’s opinion obtained by former Selectman Tommy McKenzie stating that the memorial must stay in the town.
The opinion in question said the monument can be moved, but only to “a more suitable location within the jurisdictional limits of the municipality.”
Former board attorney Wayne Dowdy told the board, “I don’t want you to ever ignore one, but they are not the law,” in response to the attorney general’s opinion.
Board attorney Angela Cockerham has argued on multiple occasions that attorney general opinions are respected but non-binding, and Brock said while digging in the city’s archives he found that the monument was dedicated to Pike County and not McComb itself, leading him to believe it could be moved to the Magnolia Confederate cemetery, which originally agreed to take the monument.
The same opinion notes that “In the case of the county, for example, a monument may be ‘moved’ within the county jurisdictional limits to some other more suitable location on county property; this may be done upon a finding by the board of supervisors that such location is more appropriate for displaying the monument.”
