Mississippi mayor says a Confederate monument is staying in storage during a lawsuit

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Confederate monument that was removed from a courthouse square in Mississippi will remain in storage rather than being put up at a new site while a lawsuit over its future is considered, a city official said Friday.

“It’s stored in a safe location,” Grenada Mayor Charles Latham told The Associated Press, without disclosing the site.

James L. Jones, who is chaplain for a Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter, and Susan M. Kirk, a longtime Grenada resident, sued the city Wednesday — a week after a work crew dismantled the stone monument, loaded it onto a flatbed truck and drove it from the place it had stood since 1910.

The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis and after Mississippi legislators retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.

The monument has been shrouded in tarps the past four years as officials sought the required state permission for a relocation and discussed how to fund the change.

The city’s proposed new site, announced days before the monument was dismantled, is behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.

The lawsuit says the monument belongs on Grenada’s courthouse square, which “has significant historical and cultural value.”

The 20-foot (6.1-meter) monument features a Confederate solider. The base is carved with images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It is engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”

Latham, who was elected in May along with some new city council members, said the monument has been a divisive feature in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.

Some local residents say the monument should go into a Confederate cemetery in Grenada.

The lawsuit includes a letter from Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney, a Republican who was a state senator in 2004 and co-authored a law restricting changes to war monuments.

“The intent of the bill is to honor the sacrifices of those who lost or risked their lives for democracy,” Chaney wrote Tuesday. “If it is necessary to relocate the monument, the intent of the law is that it be relocated to a suitable location, one that is fitting and equivalent, appropriate and respectful.”

The South has hundreds of Confederate monuments. Most were dedicated during the early 20th century, when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.

Emily Wagster Pettus, The Associated Press