Confederate soldier statue to get plaque explaining its history at Ole Miss

[struggle4progress]

Civil War and civil rights history to be explained instead of removing statue
By Scott Simmons
UPDATED 7:32 PM CDT Mar 14, 2016

... officials decided to keep the Confederate soldier statue displayed at the center of campus but add a plaque explaining why the school erected the statue in 1906.

The plaque will also explain how the statue became a rallying point during riots in 1962 tied to the admission of the first African-American student on campus ...

“I think they should (take the statue down) because there has been a lot of dispute about those things going on around here,” Natasha Bailey said ...

http://www.wapt.com/news/confederate-soldier-statue-to-get-plaque-explaining-its-history-at-ole-miss/38515700

[struggle4progress]

1. NAACP: Plaque at Confederate statue must mention slavery

BY EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press

... the campus NAACP said Monday that the university's proposed language "woefully fails its students, faculty and staff when it does not acknowledge the true history of the Confederacy" ...

The group cites Mississippi's 1861 declaration that it was seceding to protect slavery.

"It is gross negligence to assume anything other than what the authors of that declaration stated were justifiable reasons for seceding from the Union," the NAACP said in a news release. "Therefore, any academic institution decorated with Confederate monuments or iconography should wholly distance itself from these symbols of racial terror and properly contextualize the structures it cannot immediately remove with factually accurate historical context" ...

The proposed plaque says the Confederate statue was dedicated by local citizens in 1906 and was one of many monuments built across the South as aging Civil War veterans were dying. It also notes that the statue was a rallying point where a mob gathered in 1962 to oppose the admission of James Meredith as the first black student at Ole Miss ...

http://www.sunherald.com/news/state/mississippi/article66043812.html

[gratuitous]

2. A plaque, huh?

I suggest the text on the plaque be written by the descendants of the slaves that soldier was fighting to keep down.

Or just melt down the symbol of racism and repurpose it into a plowshare.