Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor:

Ida B. Wells was a civil rights activist born in Holly Springs. We have a museum and a post office named in her honor.

It has lately been proposed that Randolph Street be renamed for Ida B. Wells. When you build a new post office, you can give it any name you want. The same is true for museums or newly built thoroughfares. Changing the name of an existing street is a little different. In order to give the street a new name, you have to do away with the old one – which has sentimental memories for people who grew up on it, and may have been named in someone’s honor when it was new.

Why would anyone be interested in changing a street name? Is the purpose to honor a civil rights activist, or to drive the ever-widening wedge a little further into the race relations of this country?

Before the election of Barack Obama, race relations in this country were pretty good and getting better. Almost immediately after President Obama entered the White House, his Attorney General said that what this country needed was a frank discussion of race. Since then, there has been a lot of this sort of discussion, a lot of loose talk about hate, and a lot of urban areas torched.

We have had (and, unfortunately, fourteen years later, are still having) our race discussions. We may never get back to the level of racial harmony we enjoyed in 2008. The world is melting around us. Both Russia and China want to replace us as the world’s premier power. Both are on the verge of surpassing us in military might; and we are doing our very best to break this country into identity groups with nothing in common, each vying for the political activist’s favorite buzz-word – power.

It should be obvious by now that I believe the real purpose of renaming Randolph Street is not to honor a Civil Rights heroine, but to further divide our population at all levels of society, even here in our fairly quiet little Mississippi town. There may be some short-term political advantage to compartmentalizing society, but in the long run, we are all going to be the losers. Historically, democracies have lasted two to three hundred years. The United States has been around for two hundred forty-six years.

Very truly yours,

J.R. Dunworth Holly Springs