Shock and confusion surged through UM NAACP President Buka Okoye when he read a mass email on March 11.
The message, an announcement from Chancellor Jeffery Vitter, presented the plan to install a contextual plaque in front of the 1906 Confederate solider statue in the Circle.
The UM NAACP, a major leader in the movement to remove the Mississippi state flag from campus because of its Confederate symbol, was left completely out of the process of creating the plaque. The authors were four men appointed by Provost Morris Stocks.
The group was in disbelief.
The contextual plaque placed in front of the Confederate statue in the Circle. (Photo: Ariel Cobbert)
“You have the chapter you were just giving all of this praise to literally a month ago and all of the sudden this same chapter is coming out and saying there is something problematic about the language here,” Okoye said. “We need to go about reanalyzing this.”
Okoye said the current proposed language lacks important aspects of the statue and its history including the intent of the statue, why it was placed at the University and the chapter that erected it.
“You didn’t talk about any of these aspects,” Okoye said. “What you tried to do was water down this statue’s history and say it’s a symbol of us coming together and inclusion and toss a word in, ‘diversity,’ and James Meredith and all of the sudden it’s like, ‘What does that have to do with the statue, though?’”
When searching for ways to contextualize the plaque, finding the missing information didn’t take UM NAACP long.
“It’s not like this is hidden behind closed doors, it’s very public information,” Okoye said. “Google is the help there.”
Okoye and the other three members of the UM NAACP’s executive committee swiftly composed their own statement, releasing it Monday, March 14. They felt the pressure to publish the statement quickly to alert their members of what was happening.
A phone call from Vitter interrupted Okoye’s spring break. Okoye said Vitter admitted there was an issue with the plaque text and wanted to meet with Okoye and the executive committee.
“This seems like he’s fearful of a media firestorm, but that’s not our goal,” Okoye said. “We’re not here to embarrass the campus. We’re students here, we love the University. We just want the campus to be at a better place. Be better, do better— and you do better if you know better.”
Okoye said the contextualization committee, who drafted the language for the plaque, and administration should have incorporated more campus groups instead of doing the project on their own and hoping the students don’t organize or react by doing something which casts the University in a bad light.
“We don’t want to do that,” Okoye said. “We are trying to sit down, we’re trying to talk, we’re trying to cooperate. At the same time, when you’re not working with us at all, you leave us with fewer options.”
Multiple campus groups teamed up to draft a counter-narrative to the originally proposed language.
“This is what it should look like when you go about contextualizing something,” Okoye said. “It’s incorporating that voice that has generally and historically been missing from the conversation, but again, missed opportunity.”
A meeting between Vitter, the plaque contextualization committee and the UM NAACP executive committee is scheduled for Thursday.
Vitter and members of the contextualization committee declined to comment on the issue until after the meeting.
The UM NAACP will be presenting a revised text to go on the plaque which the Critical Race Studies Group and William Winter Institute drafted.
“For the most part, we are preparing for the worst on Thursday,” Okoye said.
UM NAACP is already reaching out to collaborators within the state and plan to branch out to the national level as well, according to Okoye.
“When we’re about to establish something that will be here for the remainder of the University, you want to go about making sure that that’s done properly and done the right way,” Okoye said. “For the most part, [Vitter] is just trying to clamp down on that voice, we don’t react well to being clamped down on.”
– Lana Ferguson
To read the original statement issued by The UM NAACP, click here.
