Jackson Free Press

GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) — A Confederate monument will remain outside a Mississippi courthouse after a majority-white board of supervisors deadlocked on a proposal to move it.

News outlets report that two supervisors in coastal Harrison County voted Monday to move the soldier statue, and two voted against moving it. The board has five members, so at least three votes were needed to approve the change. One supervisor was absent.

The public display of Confederate symbols has come under widespread debate in recent years, and that has intensified since late May, when video showed a white Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd, who died.

Mississippi legislators voted in June to retire the last state flag that had the Confederate battle emblem. Supervisors in at least four Mississippi counties — Bolivar, Leflore, Lowndes and Washington — have voted to remove Confederate monuments from outside courthouses this year. Harrison joins Lafayette and Lee counties on the list of places where supervisors have voted not to move statues. Forrest County supervisors put the issue on the Nov. 3 ballot, and a majority of residents voted to keep a monument in place.

The granite and bronze monument in Harrison County was put up in 1911 by United Daughters of the Confederacy, with financial support from the county. The Sun Herald reported that supervisors heard from two people before Monday's vote — one in favor of keeping the monument in place and one in favor of moving it.

Wallace Mason, a Confederate Veterans member, said moving the monument would be a capitulation to “the counterculture” including “anarchists and Black Lives Matter.”

“Every time you take away a piece of history, you take away somebody’s freedom, and that’s the whole bottom line with taking away monuments,” Mason said.

Jeffrey Hulum III, a Gulfport nonprofit leader who organized two protests at the monument during the summer, said that as a combat veteran, he respects devotion to a cause, even that of the Confederacy. But he said the statue does not belong at the courthouse.

“No one is trying to erase history,” Hulum said.

The only Black member of the Harrison County board, Kent Jones, has been urging his colleagues to move the monument. WLOX-TV reported that supervisor Beverly Martin joined Jones in voting for the move. Martin said some of her ancestors fought for the Confederacy but she does not think the monument should remain by the courthouse.