SERVING SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI SINCE 1927 • WWW.STUDENTPRINTZ.COM • NOVEMBER 13, 2019 | VOLUME 105 | ISSUE 12
POST-GRAD EMPLOYMENT PG 5
BABY, IT’S PC OUTSIDE PG 6
REEVES: MORE OF THE SAME PG 7
Re-examining Hattiesburg’s history: Stories unknown, retold CALEB MCCLUSKEY NEWS EDITOR Photos by Caleb McCluskey | Printz
John Wesley “Wes” Fairley’s bronze footprints can be found outside of Bliss Bridal.
attiesburg has a long history involving civil rights, from The Freedom Summer, Kennard Washington’s denial of enrollment, Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong’s acceptance to Southern Miss and even Vernon Dahmer’s story of voter suppression. Before these stories, there was a man named John Wesley “Wes” Fairley. Fairley is not a civil rights hero, but he has a memorial in downtown all the same. Some have probably walked past his memorial a dozen times without noticing. Four bronze cast footprints approximately 14 inches long walk from the edge of the sidewalk to the wall of what is now Bliss Bridal, a shop at the corner of Main and Front Street. These are Fairley’s fairly large footprints, and they mark the first memorial to African American life in Hattiesburg even though they did not start with that intention. Southern Miss alumna Lisa Foster, who has a Masters of History with a focus on War and
Society, said the footprints, which were cast in 1903, have been a mystery with many people not knowing they even exist. “A lot of people don’t know about the footprints, and [people who do] don’t know they’re his,” Foster said. Councilwoman of Ward 2 Debra Delgado said she was born and raised in Hattiesburg and never knew to whom the footprints belonged, but she used to play on them as a child by trying to step from footprint to footprint. Foster said she is absorbed in Fairley’s story. Her research focused on Mississippi history and the Civil War, but her thesis was on confederate welfare. Although she currently works as a paralegal at Medley Law Group, she still researches his story. But who was Fairley other than an African American man with an above-average shoe size? According to Foster, he was born a slave in 1840 and was respected in the lumber industry before he died in 1918. Foster said he joined
the 74th Regiment United States Colored Troops during the Civil War and stayed a part of it until 1867. Foster said she learned about Fairley while working on a speech about the Confederate monument in Hattiesburg. She said his footprints are the closest thing to not only a Union monument but also an African American Civil War monument in Hattiesburg. Foster said no one can say for sure why Fairley’s footprints were cast, but that doesn’t excuse their importance to history. “[Fairley’s] whole story is really a story of South Mississippi and how we are so connected,” Foster said. According to Foster, she learned about Fairley through Charles Sullivan, a professor at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Perkinston. She also said Sullivan learned about Fairley through a woman whose father knew him. Sullivan is quoted in two news articles between the ‘80s and early ‘00s about solving the mystery of Fairley’s footprints.
Foster said in the ‘80s, the City of Hattiesburg replaced the sidewalks downtown, and when they did that, they started wondering whose footprints were there. She said that local newspapers jumped onto the mystery, publishing stories about the footprints. Sullivan eventually learned that they were most likely Fairley’s, and the story ended. But in the late 2000s, he had to resolve the mystery. Recently, the Stone County Enterprise interviewed Sullivan about the markers in Stone County, and he brought up Fairley. “No one had heard of John Wesley Fairley, but I had. He was the most important black man of the 20th century and the late 19th century,” Sullivan said to Lyndy Berryhill of the Stone County Enterprise. “I had to do a lot of research on [W.P. Locker], but I had heard of him.”
CONTINUED | PG 3