THREAD on Oxford's Confederate Monument (with thanks to @CristenHemmins):

Yesterday, community members gathered at the Lafayette County Chancery building, where county supervisors held a special meeting to consider the fate of our town's Confededrate Monument.

Several spoke for and against removing the Confederate monument from the middle of Oxford's downtown Square yesterday evening. Among those who spoke for removing the statue was Dr. Donald Cole.

Dr. Cole is recently retired from the University of Mississippi, where he served as Assistant to the Chancellor and the University’s de facto multicultural affairs officer for more than two decades.

Yet before he was Dr. Cole, he was a student at the University, enrolling in 1968 just six years after the campus’s violent integration. At UM, Cole joined the newly established Black Student Union.

Like so many other Black students across the nation who couldn't help but be touched by the turmoil of that era, Cole became politically active and vocal around the issue of racism on campus, and in the US.

In 1970, Cole and other Black students staged an Up with the People protest, disrupting a campus event at Fulton Chapel. There, the protestors issued a set of demands that included disassociation with the Confederate flag, and the hiring of black faculty, of which there were none

For their actions, Cole and seven other students were expelled from the University. Some were forced to spend a few nights at the infamous Parchman Prison, an 18,000-acre former plantation, and the state’s oldest penitentiary.

Johnny Morgan also spoke yesterday evening, but against the monument’s removal. Morgan and his brother, Chip, have extensive ties to the Mississippi GOP state machinery.

Johnny Morgan served as a Mississippi State Senator from 1983-1991, and later president of the board of supervisors for Lafayette County.

His annual “Good Ole Boys and Girls” event is a kind of political king-making exercise for aspiring state politicians.

Meanwhile, his brother Chip is a current member of the Mississippi Board of Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), and former chief executive of the Delta Council.

The Delta Council has, among other things, argued against child labor laws, lobbied against agricultural minimum wages, worked against the interests of African American farmers in the Mississippi Delta, and even opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Morgan is also a former student of the University of Mississippi. In the spring of 1968, the semester prior to Cole’s own enrollment, Morgan was campaigning for the campus title of Johnny Rebel.

An article in the January 1969 issue of Sports Illustrated centered the contradictory role of cheer as both sporting spectacle and social-political activity. In it, the writer Pat Ryan turns to Mississippi, and the significance of cheerleading to the university ethos:

Just one week before the campus elections in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while smoking on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee.

One day prior to the campus vote, a group of Black students – between 50 to 75 according to Ryan’s reporting – marched up the street where cheerleaders were actively campaigning, promising passersby free supplies of Rebel flags in exchange for their vote.

The Black students chanted “We shall overcome” and “Black Power.” Morgan was quite candid with Sports Illustrated about what followed:

In Requiem for a Nun, the writer and former Oxford resident William Faulkner famously writes, "The past is never dead. It's not even the past."

Today, the quote is cliché and rarely used in proper context.

But rarely have the reverberations between past and present day felt so deafening as they did yesterday afternoon when Donald Cole and Johnny Morgan spoke for, and against, the removal of the Confederate Monument on the Square.