By: Dr. Rev. CJ Rhodes
Interestingly, Mississippi Today reports on this anniversary and in the first week of Black History Month that the National Park Service has removed brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument and is considering no longer naming Evers’ assassin as a racist.
To be sure, this action flows directly from an executive order issued by President Trump, cynically titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” What this order produces is not truth, nor sanity, but evasion of truth and sanitization of history.
America’s history and Mississippi’s in particular cannot be told honestly without naming racial terror, white supremacy, and the long denial of justice. Any narrative that requires us to soften the violence that killed Medgar Evers is not history. It is propaganda.
This action, and several others like it across the nation, is a deliberate act of white supremacist revisionism that seeks to turn back the clock, hollow out public memory, and erode the hard-won moral gains of the First and Second Reconstructions.
The prophet Isaiah declared, “Cry aloud, spare not.” Silence is not an option. To tell the truth, the whole truth, about America’s complicated history is not divisive. It is necessary. And it is time for all true patriots to honestly confront our past and our present in order to preserve—and more perfectly form—our union in the future.
