Mississippi governor declares April ‘Confederate Heritage Month’ for third year in a row

For the third year in a row, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves quietly signed a proclamation that declares April Confederate Heritage Month, a controversial tradition that has been practised by several of his Democratic and Republican predecessors in the southern state.

The proclamation, which was not posted to the governor’s official social media channels, nor could it be found on the Mississippi governor’s website, was instead shared to a Facebook page for the Mississippi chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Mississippi Free Press first reported.

“April is the month when, in 1861, the American Civil War began between the Confederate and Union armies,” the statement, signed and dated by the Mississippi governor on 8 April, begins.

“As we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all American to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities before us.”

The Independent reached out to the Mississippi governor’s office for comment on the recent proclamation and the press secretary for Gov Reeves said that it was signed “because [Gov Reeves] believes we can all learn from our history”.

“For the last 30 years, five Mississippi governors – Repubicans and Democrats alike – have signed a proclamation recognising the statutary state holiday and identifying April as Confederate Heritage Month,” said Shelby Wilcher, press secretary for Gov Reeves, in an e-mailed response.

It is the third year that the decree, which also acknowledges the last Monday of April as Confederate Memorial Day – “a legal holiday to honor those who served in the Confederacy” – has been signed by Gov Reeves, a tradition he has followed every year since entering office in 2020.

“Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2022 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”

Similar to previous iterations of this now annual proclamation, there is no mention of the enslavement of millions of African Americans, nor recognising the role they played in the Civil War.

Some groups, such as the aforementioned SCV, a group that Gov Reeves spoke in front of at a national reunion held in 2013, promote theories that downplay the role slavery played in the lead up to the Civil War and strive to rewrite the war’s history.

​​For instance, members of SCV worked with the United Confederate Veterans in the early 1900s to demand that school textbooks include the revisionist view that the south did not fight over slavery, but instead over a just “lost cause”.

This view, however, has widely been rejected by most historians in the field. Manisha Sinha, a historian at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, said while being interviewed in The New York Times on this very topic that “Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War if he had agreed to compromise on the nonextension of slavery, but that was one thing Lincoln refused to compromise on”.

“When it comes to the Civil War,” she added, “we still can’t seem to understand that the politics of compromise was a politics of appeasement that at many times sacrificed Black freedom and rights”.

Despite the proclamation not being aired on the governor’s official channels, it still managed to draw sharp condemnation from critics who have for years called for the southern state to do away with the month-long commemoration of the Confederacy.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation, derided the Mississippi governor’s decision to once again name April “Confederate Heritage Month”, an issue the group says they’ve taken up for the past three years.

“It is a national embarrassment that a top elected official would honor the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy, while disingenuously promoting ‘genocide awareness.’ Governor Reeves obviously needs a large dose of that awareness,” wrote Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director for CAIR, in a statement.

The “genocide awareness” that Mr Hooper refers to stems from an earlier, arguably more public, proclamation that the Mississippi governor made last month, in which he declared April as “Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month”, noting in the caption of the tweet that shared the statement that “Genocide has no place in society, and we must do everything we can to prevent it”.

Genocide, as the governor illuminated in the 15 March proclamation, is “the systematic destruction of all or a significant part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group by destroying a group’s political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion and economic existence, and destroying the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and lives of individuals belonging to the group”.

Though the statement mentions many global atrocities committed, the Cambodian killing fields, the Holocaust, the Holodomor and others, in no place does the proclamation acknowledge America’s own stain of slavery or the destruction of Native American cultures.

Mississippi is not the only state that continues to celebrate the “heritage” of the American Civil War, which officially began in April of 1861.

As recently as 2019, Alabama’s governor proclaimed April to be Confederate History Month. And three states, including Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, recognise Confederate Memorial Day as an official holiday.

In 2020, Gov Reeves signed a bill to retire Mississippi’s flag, which up until that year was the last state in the nation to feature the Confederate battle emblem, largely denounced as a hate symbol that remains popular among white supremacists in the US.