Gov. Reeves Declares Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi

For the fourth 12 months in a row, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has signed a proclamation declaring April as Accomplice Heritage Month in Mississippi, protecting alive a 30-year-old custom that former Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice first started. Black folks make up 38% of Mississippi’s inhabitants, which is the best for any state.

A department of the Sons of Accomplice Veterans, the SCV Camp 265 Rankin Tough & Prepared’s, posted a replica of the proclamation on its Fb web page on Tuesday afternoon.

“Whereas, as we honor all who misplaced their lives in (the Civil Struggle), it can be crucial for all People to mirror upon our nation’s previous, to realize perception from our errors and successes, and to return to a full understanding that the teachings discovered yesterday and right now will carry us by way of tomorrow if we rigorously and earnestly try to know and recognize our heritage and our alternatives which lie earlier than us,” the proclamation says.

“Now, subsequently, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2023 as Accomplice Heritage Month within the State of Mississippi.”

Beginning in 2016, Donna Ladd reported first after which yearly within the Jackson Free Press on then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant’s Accomplice Heritage Month proclamations, and afterward Reeves’ first Accomplice Heritage Month proclamation in 2020. The Mississippi Free Press reported on Reeves’ proclamations in 2021 and 2022.

Reeves’ 2023 proclamation is dated April 31, 2023—a date that doesn’t exist as a result of April solely has 30 days. In Fb feedback, members of the SCV Camp 265 Rankin Tough & Prepared’s famous the error, with the group’s administrator writing, “what do you anticipate it’s from Tater.” 

“Woops,” the administrator added in a followup remark.

The group has posted Reeves’ proclamations yearly since 2021; the R.E. Lee Camp 239 SCV Fb group posted the 2020 proclamation. With out SCV teams posting the proclamations and the Jackson Free Press and Mississippi Free Press reporting on them, they may have gone unnoticed as they did earlier than 2016; neither the governor nor some other state official publicizes the proclamations or posts them on any state web sites or social-media pages.

Reeves defended issuing the proclamations in 2021.

“For the final 30 years, 5 Mississippi governors—Republicans and Democrats alike—have signed a proclamation recognizing the statutory state vacation and figuring out April as Accomplice Heritage Month,” he stated in a press release to WAPT on the time. “Gov. Reeves additionally signed the proclamation as a result of he believes we will all study from our historical past.”

Governor Makes Proclamations On SCV’s Behalf

After Fordice turned Mississippi’s first Republican governor in a century whereas courting the white supremacist Council of Conservative Residents and criticizing efforts to atone for the state’s racist previous, he issued the inaugural Accomplice Heritage Month proclamation on the request of the Sons of Accomplice Veterans in 1993.

Since then, one Democratic governor and three Republican governors have adopted Fordice’s lead. Within the 30 years since, just one governor has ever skipped issuing a Accomplice Heritage Month proclamation. Regardless of issuing them for his first seven years in workplace between 2011 and 2018, former Gov. Bryant didn’t challenge a Accomplice Heritage Month proclamation in 2019, his final 12 months in workplace, opting as a substitute for a “Month of Unity” proclamation on behalf of a Christian group.

The language in Reeves’ Accomplice Heritage Month proclamation makes use of a lot of the identical language as one which former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004, issued in April 2000. Musgrove advised Mississippi Right now in 2016 that he regretted signing the proclamations. Former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour additionally signed Accomplice Heritage Month proclamations yearly between 2004 and 2016.

The SCV is a neo-Accomplice group that promotes Misplaced Trigger myths that downplay slavery as the first reason for the Civil Struggle. The group additionally runs Beauvoir, the Gulf Coast residence of Accomplice President Jefferson Davis. Beauvoir is now a museum that yearly receives $100,000 from the State of Mississippi “for the aim of capital improvement and upkeep.”

Although Accomplice Heritage teams like SCV promote a whitewashed model of the South’s function within the Civil Struggle that has usually made its method into textbooks within the state and all through the nation, the historic document makes clear that slavery was the first reason for the Union’s break up and the next Civil Struggle.

“Our place is totally recognized with the establishment of slavery—the best materials curiosity of the world,” Mississippi’s 1861 Declaration of Secession says. “Its labor provides the product which constitutes by far the most important and most vital parts of commerce of the earth.”

Reeves’ ties to the SCV stretch again lengthy earlier than his time as governor. In 2013, he spoke to the SCV’s nationwide gathering in Vicksburg, Miss., in entrance of a large Accomplice battle flag and in a room adorned with smaller Accomplice flags and cotton crops. After then-Lt. Gov. Reeves congratulated the group for “protecting historical past for our youth,” audio system defended the Accomplice “trigger” and in contrast “Yankees” to German “Nazis” in World Struggle II.

Lengthy earlier than coming into politics, Reeves was a part of a Millsaps Faculty fraternity recognized for Accomplice-themed events the place members wore blackface and for lionizing Accomplice Basic Robert E. Lee. When it turned a problem in his 2019 marketing campaign for governor, although, he denied ever carrying blackface. 

Reeves’ Democratic opponent on the time, then-Legal professional Basic Jim Hood, was additionally in a fraternity on the College of Mississippi the place members wore blackface; he equally denied ever collaborating.

Reeves Denied Existence of ‘Systemic Racism’

Within the many years after the Civil Struggle ended, Accomplice veterans, corresponding to Mississippi State College inaugural President Stephen D. Lee, and teams like SCV started the work of remaking historical past in a method that shone a extra favorable mild on the South—muddying the waters over the reason for the warfare and falsely describing it as a “warfare of northern aggression.”

After the Civil Struggle and the failure of Reconstruction, Mississippi’s white leaders labored to enshrine white supremacy in state regulation, adopting a Jim Crow structure in 1890 (its racist felony voter disenfranchisement provision stays in state regulation and continues to disproportionately disenfranchise Black voters). White supremacist leaders in Mississippi renewed efforts to enshrine Accomplice heritage within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties in response to the rise of the civil rights motion.

Mississippi’s Accomplice-themed 1894 state flag flew over state buildings till 2020, when state lawmakers voted to retire and substitute it amid a nationwide race reckoning about Black activists’ efforts for many years and within the wake of younger Black Mississippians main protests towards racism and the Mississippi flag after the homicide of George Floyd. Regardless of his marketing campaign pledge to not help efforts to retire the flag, Gov. Reeves signed the invoice retiring the outdated flag into regulation, calling it “a regulation to show a web page in Mississippi right now.”

“It’s trendy in some quarters to say our ancestors had been all evil. I reject that notion. I additionally reject the elitist worldview that these United States are something however the biggest nation within the historical past of mankind. I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our historical past—north and south, Union and Accomplice, founding fathers and veterans,” the governor stated in 2020, criticizing Black Lives Matter protesters at the same time as he signed the laws retiring the outdated state flag. “I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I’m proud it has not occurred in our state.”

Regardless of signing the regulation that modified the outdated flag, although, Gov. Reeves continued to disclaim the lasting results of the state’s white supremacist historical past. In 2021, he advised Fox Information that “there may be not systemic racism in America”—contradicting mountains of proof, together with the vestiges of Jim Crow that stay in power in Mississippi regulation just like the State’s racially focused 1890 voter disenfranchisement regulation.

Then, in 2022, Reeves signed a so-called “vital race idea ban” into regulation, which is a misnomer as a result of regardless of its legislative title, the regulation neither mentions nor describes vital race idea. As he signed the invoice, the governor claimed that “vital race idea is working amok,” even though the lawmakers who drafted it admitted that they didn’t know of any public Okay-12 colleges the place the tutorial idea is taught.

He additionally painted vital race idea, which addresses systemic racial inequalities within the authorized system and all through society,  as a software of indoctrination that’s used to “humiliate” white folks.

“Youngsters are dragged to the entrance of the classroom and are coerced to declare themselves as oppressors, that they need to really feel responsible due to their race, or that they’re inherently a sufferer due to their race,” he stated on the time.

For extra on the Sons of Accomplice Veterans, “redemption” schemes, and the censorship marketing campaign to romanticize and sanitize the Confederacy in southern and U.S. textbooks, learn this in-depth piece about first Mississippi State College President Stephen D. Lee’s profitable efforts to rewrite the Accomplice narrative.