University of Mississippi Providing Context to Reconstruction Era Memorials and Jim Crow Monuments

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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The University of Mississippi is installing interpretive plaques for Reconstruction Era memorials on campus.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/us/ole-miss-confederacy.html?_r=0

According to the article:

Other than William Faulkner and the father and son quarterbacks Archie and Eli Manning, few figures in this town’s history are better known locally than Lucius Q. C. Lamar.

A professor at Ole Miss before and after the Civil War, he served in both chambers of Congress and as a Supreme Court justice.

Oxford’s main thoroughfare, lined with stately homes and towering oaks, is named Lamar Avenue. His home, restored as a museum, is on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1977, Ole Miss dedicated a major building as Lamar Hall.

That building will soon get a plaque more fully describing Lamar’s legacy.

Lamar drafted the state’s orders of secession, funded his own Confederate regiment and held 31 slaves. After the war, he remained a divisive figure, delivering speeches that riled up whites in a violent 1875 election that he said “involved the supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race,” according to one newspaper account of the day
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