As Mississippi continues to try to distance itself from images that glorify the Confederacy and the war it fought in defense of slavery, one area that remains to be addressed is the two individuals chosen almost a century ago to represent this state in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
Since 1931, Mississippi has been represented by statues of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and J.Z. George, the Carroll County statesman whose legacy included both good and bad. George, while serving in the U.S. Senate, helped frame the future Sherman Anti-Trust Act and encouraged the establishment of the federal Department of Agriculture. He is best-remembered, however, for being a chief architect of the state’s 1890 constitution, which was designed to restore and preserve white supremacy.
There has been a growing call to replace both those statues to better reflect the Mississippi of today. This state that has come a long way in race relations. It also has worked hard to repair its national image, which was severely tarnished by the Jim Crow laws of the past and the state’s violent resistance to desegregation and the exercise of civil and voting rights by its Black citizens. New statues at the U.S. Capitol would be another tangible way to show the progress.
Whether to replace the statues of Davis and George is not really the tough question. The tough question is who should take their place, as the only criteria are that the honorees be prominent citizens of their state and deceased.
Mac Gordon, a native of McComb and a retired newspaperman, makes two good suggestions in a column he still writes regularly for the Clarion Ledger of Jackson.
He suggests the replacements should be the assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Eudora Welty. In a selection like this, there is no pleasing everyone, but Gordon believes this combination would please a majority of Mississippi’s citizens. Evers’ statue would represent those who struggled and sacrificed greatly in the pursuit of basic human rights, and Welty’s would honor the artistic legacy of a state that has one of the highest per-capita outputs of gifted writers in the country.
Mississippi would not be alone in changing its Capitol statues with the times. Arkansas is in the process of replacing its two statues — two long-forgotten figures from the 19th and early 20th centuries — with Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader well-known in that state, and Johnny Cash, an internationally recognized musical icon.
Gordon says he doesn’t see how Mississippi “could go wrong” with a similar combination of Evers and Welty. Some will have other ideas of whom it should be.
The process, though, should be started by Mississippi lawmakers. Recommendations to do so, including appointing a committee to study the issue, did not survive the 2024 legislative session. Surely the issue will be coming back up in 2025 and probably every year after that until Mississippi acts.
Just like changing the state flag didn’t go away, neither will this. Mississippi should not wait until it becomes a highly divisive issue to do something.
