LETTER TO THE EDITOR
I grew up in E. St. Louis, Illinois in a neighborhood that looked a lot like Holly Springs.
When I moved to Holly Springs, I thought I had found a little bit of paradise. The town had a rich history which, with the right promotion, could have been a tourist magnet; and it had a mayor who seemed to understand the town’s potential. The mayor seemed to be well liked by all the citizenry. Race relations looked pretty good.
After the year 2000, national politics coarsended. After 2008, some people decided to “improve” race relations; and race became the murky lens through which nearly everything was viewed. In Holly Springs, several well-intention people founded “Gracing the Table,” a discussion group designed to talk about and improve race relations. I was invited to join, but declined because I thought the effort might do more harm than good. It has been my experience that healing is not promoted by picking at scabs.
Holly Springs is a town with a lot of history and a lot of antebellum houses that used to be a tourist attraction, at least a couple of times a year. COVID has pretty well ended the house tours, and whether or not there will ever be another is in, at least some, doubt. According to the South Reporter, at the 22 February Special meeting of the Board of Aldermen, the curator of the Ida B. Wells Museum stated, “We have to get to a point of working together and forget about these houses”. I leave it to the reader to interpret that statement. At the same meeting, the mayor said that she opposed renaming Memphis Street in Wells’ honor because it was on the Black side of town (South Reporter 3-3-22, p. 11). I leave that statement as well to the reader’s interpretation.
When I moved to Holly Springs, the town was vibrant, with three pharmacies, two dry cleaners, several restaurants, two florists, two supermarkets, and about 60 antebellum houses. Today we’ve lost a couple of the houses that “we need to forget about”, and a couple more have deteriorated to the point at which they probably cannot be saved. The town is deteriorating.
There are towns that were prominent stops on the underground railway. There are towns that figured prominently in the civil rights struggles of the sixities. There are towns where brilliant 19th century black men contributed to the world’s scientific knowledge. What does Holly Springs have? Ida B. Wells – a champion of civil rights who was born in this town and left it to do her work elsewhere. That is a slim reed on which to hang a town’s fortunes.
Very truly yours,
J.R. Dunworth