The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) is reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s assessment of Richard Nixon, “He’s like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards.”
Or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem,
“There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.”
It is difficult to reconcile a governmental department that accomplishes so much, extraordinarily well, with the entity that razed the city of Jackson’s flagship library.
The employees of MDAH are stellar individuals for whom I have utmost regard. Their probity is such that, if asked about book bans, they would agree that limiting access to books is indefensible. Nonetheless MDAH displayed no hesitation before eliminating a library housing countless volumes.
Why was the Eudora Welty Library razed? The flagship library was removed because its loading dock was conspicuous opposite the Two Mississippi Museums entry. (Please note the irony that the department overseeing the Eudora Welty House and the Eudora Welty Foundation destroyed the Eudora Welty Library.)
MDAH knew the location of the library’s loading dock before it broke ground for the two museums. They could have been entered on Mississippi Street or North Jefferson Street. A blind eye is turned toward that inconvenient truth as Jackson endures the absence of a flagship library, a crowning symbol of civic pride. Whenever Jacksonians lament the lack of a flagship library — as far as the eye can see — the penalty paid for serving as the state’s capital is inescapable.
Please do not take this critique to disapprove of public spaces shared by rich and poor alike. I am an advocate of public parks and prefer as many as possible, available in as many places as possible.
What I deplore, first and foremost, is that Jackson lacks sufficient funds to maintain city streets. MDAH could have constructed a state of the art public library, at state expense, in exchange for vacating the property sought. What occurred is as if one’s next-door neighbor bulldozed one’s home, refused recompense, and justified outrageous presumption, saying that the neighborhood was enhanced by the creation of green space.
The Northside Sun reported, on Friday August 22, 2025, that Jeanne Williams, Executive Director of the Jackson Hinds Library System, has informed Jackson’s City Council that the system’s board of directors recently “toured potential sites in an effort to re-establish the demolished Eudora Welty Library… ‘To renovate one of those sites would have been in the $12 million to $18 million range…’”
Second, state elected officials vociferously decry Federal Government overreach but, when the State Government overreaches, no conceivable dissembling is deemed excessive:
When Thompson Field opened in 1963, it was built by the City of Jackson but, when the State of Mississippi sought control over our airport, the property was appropriated — once again without the citizens of Jackson being paid for the taking. White legislators from elsewhere in the state imposed a state police force upon the City of Jackson, supplanting local control; symbolically casting aspersions upon African American elected officials. Our municipal water system was similarly wrested from the City of Jackson.
Please do not misunderstand: Jackson’s crime rate and municipal water system shortcomings are deplorable. Yet innumerable ways exist to coalesce improvement symbiotically, instead of hypocritically ignoring vaunted verities about local control being the lodestar — with smaller entities preferred over larger ones.
Finally, MDAH, given its focus on Mississippi history, is acutely aware of Mississippi’s troubling tradition of silencing dissent; running from town anyone saying what people in power do not want heard. I will not win friends among individuals fearful of realities being exposed that they prefer go unexamined notwithstanding the importance of pondering the pertinent problems implicated.
Not unlike Martin Luther’s protest, “I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
