Corinth police officers are guarding the Confederate monument that sits in front of Alcorn County Courthouse.
The monument honors William Rogers, a colonel in the Confederate army. Rogers also practiced medicine and law.
Corinth Police Department said officers were alerted to an online threat that said people would be tearing the monument down on Friday afternoon. The threat also called for the removal of 10 other statues across the south by 5 p.m.
After the deadly white supremacist rally in Virginia, pushes to remove Confederate monuments have grown. Various cities throughout the south, including Memphis, are discussing the legality of removing the monuments.
A small crowd of people stayed around the statue all day, including Wade Sockwell, who drove 40 miles from Alabama.
“I want preservation of history, all good and all bad of history,” Sockwell said.
Police and sheriff’s deputies stood guard, putting a barrier around the statue.
“We are taking that threat seriously,” said Corinth Police Chief Ralph Dance. “We’re going to protect our property the city and county people paid for. We’re not going to let outsiders come in here and destroy our community.”
Citizens stood alongside law enforcement, not inspired by hate they say, but inspired to protect what they believe is history that deserves to be publicly displayed.
“Somebody tries to take it down, we will defend it,” said Corinth resident Chris Grimes. “Hopefully not violently, we don’t want to be violent.”
Major media outlets this week encouraged people to speculate on whether President Trump is a racist and even commissioned artists to convey the idea that he is, but still fell short of generating a consensus that Trump is prejudiced against non-whites.
The effort is nearly a week old now. It began Saturday when Trump was criticized for not immediately singling out neo-Nazis and white supremacists for their role in the violence in Charlottesville, Va.
When Trump finally did identify the groups on Monday, the press said he was too slow. Then a day later, Trump again condemned white supremacists, but also said at a press conference that both the white supremacist protesters and counter-protesters were violent, and that there is blame on “both sides.”
By Thursday, major magazines were declaring Trump a racist. Or at least, they were suggesting it with the art on their new covers.
The Economist started it off with a story titled “Donald Trump has no grasp of what it means to be president.” It was accompanied by a depiction of Trump shouting into a bullhorn in the shape of a Ku Klux Klan hood.
Donald Trump is politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for office https://t.co/xLDMtLclUw— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 17, 2017
The New Yorker also took on Trump by revealing its new cover: a depiction of Trump on a sailboat, blowing into the sail that is also shaped like a KKK hood. The cover art is titled, “Blowhard.”
Former NBA star and current Turner Sports analyst Charles Barkley told a local sportscaster he would rather spend his time trying to do good things in the world than waste his time worrying about Confederate statues.
“I’m not going to waste my time worrying about these Confederate statues,” Barkley said. “That’s wasted energy. You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna keep doing great things. I’m gonna keep trying to make a difference number one in the black community — because I’m black — but also gonna try to do good things in the world. I’m not gonna waste my time screaming at a neo-Nazi who’s gonna hate me no matter what, and I’m not gonna waste my time worried about these statues that they’ve got all over the country.”
Rick Karle, a sportscaster for a local FOX affiliate in Birmingham, then asked Barkley if the solution was to leave the statues and up and just simply ignore them.
At least 2,000 educators around the country reported racist slurs and other derogatory language leveled against white students in the first days after Donald Trump was elected president. But the group that surveyed the teachers didn’t publish the results in its report on Trump-related “hate crimes.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with the American Federation of Teachers, which formally endorsed Hillary Clinton, to circulate the questionnaire among its 1.6 million mostly Democratic members. The survey was sent out to K-12 teachers and administrators who subscribe to its “Teaching Tolerance” newsletter.
The SPLC’s widely cited report — “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Presidential Election on Our Nation’s Schools” — reported that 40 percent of the more than 10,000 educators who responded to the survey “have heard derogatory language directed at students of color, Muslims, immigrants and people based on gender or sexual orientation.”
The takeaway was that Trump-supporting white kids have been harassing minorities at the nation’s schools. And SPLC’s schools report, along with a broader report on alleged Trump-inspired hate crimes — “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election” — sparked breathless coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and other major media.
The reports also triggered a statement Friday from the US Commission on Civil Rights, which expressed “deep concern” that “prejudice has reared its ugly head in public elementary and secondary schools.” The panel called for more federal funding to prosecute “hate crimes.”
But the SPLC didn’t present the whole story. The Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit self-censored results from a key question it asked educators — whether they agree or disagree with the following statement: “I have heard derogatory language or slurs about white students.”
Asked last week to provide the data, SPLC initially said it was having a hard time getting the information “from the researchers.” Pressed, SPLC spokeswoman Kirsten Bokenkamp finally revealed that “about 20 percent answered affirmatively to that question.”
The Florida man who allegedly ambushed and killed two Kissimmee police officers Friday night is a self-professed member of a black extremist group who appears to have been upset by last week’s events in Charlottesville, Va.
Everett Glenn Miller, 45, was arrested and charged with first degree murder in the killing of Officers Sam Howard and Matthew Baxter.
Miller, who goes by the name Malik Mohammad Ali on Facebook, allegedly ambushed and shot the officers as they were responding to a disturbance call.
A Confederate memorial is slated to be erected this month near Montgomery, Alabama, notwithstanding mounting efforts to dismantle similar monuments across the country.
The monument to “unknown Confederate soldiers” is currently being installed next to the Dry Creek RV Park in Brantley, Ala., and will be formally unveiled during an afternoon ceremony slated for Aug. 27, AL.com reported Friday.
“The public’s invited,” Jimmy Hill, commander of the Alabama division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the website. “Anyone who wants to can come to celebrate the unveiling of another monument to Confederate soldiers.”
A House Democrat called on the vice president and the Cabinet to force President Trump to undergo a mental evaluation, demanding that they see whether he’s incapacitated and needs to be suspended from office under the 25th Amendment.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, California Democrat, wondered whether Mr. Trump may have dementia or whether the “stress of office aggravated a mental illness crippling impulse control.”
“Is the president mentally and emotionally stable?” she wondered in a press release issued by her office.
In California, the raging U.S. cultural battle over Civil War icons has spread to the names of horses.
At the University of Southern California, a student group has declared the equine mascot of the school’s Trojans football team to be a symbol of “white supremacy.”
Why? Because the horse bears a name similar to that of a steed that belonged to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The USC football horse is called Traveler (one L), while Lee’s horse was known as Traveller (two L’s).
The student group’s leader voiced her disapproval of the home team horse’s name earlier this week, at an on-campus rally to protest last week’s violence in Charlottesville, Va.
“White supremacy hits close to home,” Saphia Jackson, co-director of the USC Black Student Assembly, told fellow students, in pointing out the similarity in the horses’ names, student newspaper the Daily Trojan reported.
The Black Student Assembly didn’t respond to a Fox News inquiry on whether the group wanted Traveler renamed or removed.
The NAACP has called for a boycott of the NFL. The organization says the league treated free agent Colin Kaepernick unfairly for his headline grabbing protest during the national anthem.
The NAACP is asking Falcons fans everywhere to take a knee on the NFL. They say that means they don’t want fans coming to Mercedes-Benz Stadium for the season opener or even watching the team on television.
Now the bold demand is directly related to the treatment of 49ers former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the national anthem for most of last season.
Kaepernick has not been signed by an NFL team. This boycott is not just here in Georgia. It is nationwide. The NAACP says they are planning to send a strong message to not only commissioner Rodger Goodell, but NFL owners like Arthur Blank.
“There will be no football in the state of Georgia if Colin Kaepernick is not on a training camp roster and given an opportunity to pursue his career,” said Gerald Griggs from Atlanta NAACP. “This is not a simple request. This is a statement. This is a demand.and if Mr. Kaepernick is not allowed to pursue his career, then on September the 17th, at 5:00, we are going to have the world’s largest tailgate, and that tailgate will not go into Mercedes-Benz Stadium. We will take a knee, and we will continue to take a knee on the NFL until they act with one voice.”
New York activist Al Sharpton offered an emotional and personal case calling for the federal government to halt funding to Washington, D.C.’s Jefferson Memorial.
Sharpton said America’s third president and the author of the Declaration of Independence had several slaves.
His iconic round-roofed memorial sits on the edge of Potomac River- the first of several monuments lining Washington’s Ohio Drive.
Sharpton also noted how Jefferson is said to have fathered a child with a slave named Sally Hemings.
“People need to understand that people were enslaved,” Sharpton told PBS’ Charlie Rose.
Rep. Maxine Waters talked about Secretary Ben Carson and Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the same sentence as the white nationalist, KKK, and Nazi who participated in the violence that occurred Charlottesville VA over the weekend during a town hall in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Five Moroccan citizens have been arrested in connection to the fatal stabbing rampage Friday in the Finnish city of Turku.
Two people were killed and another eight were injured in what police consider a terror attack. One suspect is still at large and an international arrest warrant has been issued.
Witnesses report that the attackers shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is great) during the rampage, according to Finnish broadcaster YLE.
“Due to information received during the night, the Turku stabbings are now being investigated as murders with terrorist intent,” Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Federal agents probing a $4.5 million corruption scandal are investigating questionable spending by more leaders of the United Auto Workers, including pricey designer purses and a $2,180 shotgun bought with union training center funds, The Detroit News has learned.
The investigation has entangled current and former top UAW officials, including union Vice President Norwood Jewell, who received the shotgun as a birthday present in 2015 after the firearm was purchased with funds earmarked for blue-collar workers, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
The purchase is part of a broader pattern of personal spending by some board members at the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center, multiple sources told The News. The UAW said that Jewell didn’t know the shotgun was purchased with training center money.
The case has implicated Jewell’s predecessor, the late General Holiefield, and led to criminal charges against three people, including a former Fiat Chrysler top labor executive and Holiefield’s widow.
The purchases offer insight into what people familiar with the case describe as a culture of entitlement among labor leaders and Fiat Chrysler executives working at the Detroit training center.
With the departure from the White House of strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who helped shape the so-called nationalist-populist program embraced by Donald Trump in his unlikely path to election, a new phase of the Trump presidency begins. Given Trump’s nature, what comes next will hardly be conventional, but it may well be less willfully disruptive—which, to Bannon, had been the point of winning the White House.
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
Bannon says that he will return to the helm of Breitbart, the rambunctious right-wing media enterprise he ran until joining the Trump campaign as chief executive last August. At the time, the campaign was at its nadir, and Trump was trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls by double digits.
A Virginia city is canceling a planned “Civil War Weekend” in the wake of last week’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The city of Manassas issued a statement Friday announcing the Civil War Weekend planned for Aug. 25-27, has been canceled. The city said its leaders are saddened by recent violence and want to avoid making the situation worse.
“Recent events have ignited passions in this country surrounding the Civil War and the symbols representing it,” the statement said, noting the move was for the “the safety of our residents, visitors and reenactors.”
