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THE DAILY
MISSISSIPPIAN
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Volume 105, No. 102
T H E S T U D E N T N E W S PA P E R O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M I S S I S S I P P I S E R V I N G O L E M I S S A N D OX F O R D S I N C E 1 9 1 1
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Context committee to rename Vardaman Hall
PHOTO BY: CAMERON BROOKS
Students, faculty and members of the Oxford community gathered at the Ole Miss Inn on Monday for the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Context Listening Session. During the meeting, the audience was encouraged to ask questions and comment on the progress made so far by the committee and what lies ahead before the deadline to submit final recommendations.
CLARA TURNAGE
dmeditor@gmail.com
T
he name of Vardaman Hall will be changed and seven other sites on campus will be altered or contextualized, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Context said Monday. The committee is currently taking recommendations for the contextualizing material for Lamar Hall, Barnard Observato-
ry, Longstreet Hall and George Hall, with a deadline of the semester’s end to submit their final recommendations. Antebellum sites such as the Lyceum, Barnard Hall, Croft and Hilgard Cut are also being considered for contextualizing because they were each built by enslaved people. These sites were determined during phase one of the committee’s charge, which took recommendations through their website starting in August. The committee received
45 buildings or places recommended for change. In phase one, members of the committee gathered these recommendations and researched each of them in order to form an opinion on whether it needed contextualization. The committee met eight times last semester. The committee was met with many questions from the the 50 or so students, faculty and community members in the listening session. Several students posed ques-
tions to Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter who, after opening up the meeting and hearing the introductions led by members of the committee, left. Jackson Lovelady, freshman business management major who asked several questions at the meeting, said he felt his questions could have been better answered had the chancellor been there. “If the chancellor was here, (my question) would have been answered,” Lovelady said.
One of Lovelady’s final questions was about the organization of the committee. Who has the final say in whether a building is contextualized or not? Lovelady asked. “The chancellor,” said Donald Cole, provost for academic affairs, who answered the majority of the questions. The meeting was recorded on video and several students took notes; Cole said these materials
SEE VARDAMAN PAGE 3
Mississippi state flag fight moves to new battlefield ASSOCIATED PRESS
EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A long-running feud over the Confederate battle emblem on the Mississippi flag is moving onto a new legal battlefield. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday over reviving a 2016 lawsuit filed by an African-American attorney, Carlos Moore. He contends the flag is “state-sanctioned hate speech.” In a state with a 38 percent black population, Moore says the flag sends an unconstitutional message that black residents, including his young daughter, are
second-class citizens. The flag has been used since 1894, causing division for generations. Opponents say it’s a reminder of slavery and segregation, while supporters say it represents history and heritage. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves dismissed Moore’s suit in September, saying Moore lacked legal standing to sue because he failed to show the emblem caused an identifiable legal injury. Moore wants the appeals court to order Reeves to hold a full trial on his arguments. “To the extent Judge Reeves discussed the merits, he had some things to say which were
very much in accord with the allegations Carlos made,” said Moore’s attorney, Mike Scott. Republican Gov. Phil Bryant has said repeatedly that if the flag design is to be reconsidered, it should be done by the voters, not by lawmakers or the courts. On behalf Bryant, state assistant attorneys general Douglas Miracle and Harold Pizzetta wrote in arguments to the appeals court: “The district court was correct that Moore fails to identify that part of the Constitution that guarantees a legal right to be free of anxiety.” Mississippi’s state flag is the last in the nation to prominent-
ly feature the Confederate battle emblem — a red field topped by a blue X dotted with 13 white stars. In a 2001 referendum, voters chose to keep it. Like other Confederate symbols, the Mississippi flag has come under increased scrutiny since the June 2015 killings of black worshippers in South Carolina. The white man convicted in 2016 in that case had posed with the Confederate battle flag in photos published online. Several cities and counties and seven of Mississippi’s eight public universities have stopped flying the state flag. In dismissing Moore’s suit, Reeves, who is also Afri-
can-American, picked apart arguments made outside the courtroom by many flag supporters who say Mississippi’s secession from the union before the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Reeves quoted the state’s 1861 secession declaration, which said: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Then, the judge continued in his own words: “To put it plainly, Mississippi was so devoted to the subjugation of African-Americans that it sought to form a new nation predicated upon white supremacy.”