Mississippi is removing the confederate symbol from their state flag, and Rhode Island is removing the word “plantation” from their name!
My father was born in rural Mississippi in the late 1930s. He died in the early 2000s in Michigan where he’d relocated right after high school, his life having been cut short by his lifestyle. But had he lived to see today, he’d have died all over again to see the Mississippi legislature change the state’s flag, removing the confederate flag from it entirely, as it did last weekend.
After my grandmother died in the 1990s and Dad learned that a large parcel of Mississippi land had been left to him and his siblings, he immediately signed his share of it over to his brothers and sisters. Even after all of those years, my father wanted no part of the ownership of Mississippi earth that had buried countless black men who had been lynched, or worked to death in enslavement.
Dad specifically and often said that the Mississippi state flag would never come down. But just as he said that this country would never elect an African American president, Dad was wrong.
As I’ve watched the country respond to the murder of George Floyd, I’ve wondered why that act seems to have been a tipping point. We’ve, sadly, seen many George Floyds, going back to Emmett Till. My dad used to insist that Till’s name was just the one we knew. In my lifetime, I can recall, first, Rodney King. My sister lived in Sanford, Florida when Trayvon Martin was killed there.
But Floyd’s murder, and the subsequent unflinching and undeterred action of the Black Lives Matter movement, seems to have made a change that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. And as I’m composing my thoughts for this column, the governor of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations signed an executive order to shorten the state’s name to Rhode Island, removing the reference to a locale that was the home to enslaved Africans.
Now, who knew that Rhode Island’s official name included a plantation reference for all of these years??
The cynic in me wants to wonder how long the shift we’re seeing will last. But the optimist in me, the better part of me, believes that we’ve only just begun to see the changes that are on the horizon. Country music acts, most notably and recently The Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum, have changed their names to eliminate associations between their music and the Old South. Country music acts.
Schools are removing the names of segregationists from campus buildings.
And Dad didn’t live to see any of it. I wish he’d been able to beat his addictions. But then, if he had, he might have fallen over dead all over again.
Mississippi?? Come ON!
Black Lives Matter!
Michael's Mind's Eye 