The Sunflower County Board of Supervisors will have a full plate in 2019.
The board will likely continue to tackle the issue of failing infrastructure, as money begins to trickle in to address crumbling roads and bridges, and hopefully, the arrival of new Sunflower County Economic Development Director Frederick Washington will yield new jobs for the area.
The body already has two issues it has promised to discuss during its first 2019 meeting on Jan. 7.
Board President Glenn Donald told Mississippi Valley State University Professor Cassie Sade Turnipseed last week that it would consider allowing a newly-formed historic site group that she represents to place a marker on or near the Sunflower County Courthouse steps to commemorate Fannie Lou Hamer’s stand for voting rights in the 1960s.
Turnipseed also asked the board to consider placing a monument that identifies 12 recorded persons who lost their lives due to lynchings in Sunflower County, according to The E-T’s story on last week’s board meeting, which appears on page 2.
According to Turnipseed, that pillar is a temporary element of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, located in Montgomery.
Turnipseed said that if Sunflower County voted to accept this pillar from the Alabama center, it would be the first in the state to do so.
The board would be wise to listen on both of these issues.
There is a historical marker in Ruleville that recognizes Hamer’s stand for voting rights, but it would be fitting if there were also something in Indianola.
The courthouse in Indianola was ground zero for Hamer’s fight for equal rights. It is where she and others stood down threats and persecution from local whites. It is where she and a group were initially turned away, and it is the place where she would eventually register to vote for the first time.
Turnipseed’s second request represents a much darker element of Mississippi’s past that needs to be recognized.
According to Turnipseed, Mississippi ranks No.1 among the 50 states in recorded lynchings with 654, a dozen of those having occurred in Sunflower County.
Mississippi, as a whole, has made efforts to recognize and learn from its past, particularly with the recent opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, but it would be appropriate for each county that has a pillar at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to accept and display that monument.
These issues will undoubtedly make people uncomfortable, but until they are addressed, it will be difficult for counties like Sunflower to move forward.
The notion that these matters need to be brushed away and forgotten because “it is in the past” is at the heart of so many issues in this community.
Making something disappear does nothing to help repair relationships, reconcile people and build trust between multiple generations of whites and African Americans.
Proponents of the current Mississippi state flag should agree. That is precisely the argument used to support the existence of the Confederate battle emblem on the corner of the flag.
These two markers alone will not solve the deep-seeded problems that exist in Sunflower County and the Mississippi Delta, but they would represent some progress in that area.
And progress tends to breed progress.
What better talking point could there be for prospective companies than to have something tangible that shows Sunflower County is progressing and moving in the right direction?
The status quo is not working. It is time to change the approach and to change the narrative for Sunflower County.
