[Your Turn] Don’t Light The Fire

by Dylan Mclemore
January 19, 2005

When the airport renaming story broke, it had the potential of yet another racial war in a place that certainly didn’t need any help in that department.

Political leaders in Mississippi, Jackson in particular, waste obscene amounts of time and money on superfluous, cosmetic racial issues. Need I remind anyone of the flag controversy? When schools are performing poorly, the economy is down, and crime is rampant, our leaders throw up the equivalent of a sideshow act—a new racial issue to spark debate and conflict among the citizens and the politicians themselves. Then the issue drags out, blown up so big that it becomes the most important thing in an area that is in dire need of progress, not regression to the time of separate bathrooms.

That’s just the way Mississippi works, and yet we scratch our heads or become infuriated when we are viewed by the nation as “backward.”

That’s why I have to commend the Jackson City Council on their handling of the airport controversy that never really was. The city leaders involved were swift in their action. They didn’t offer up time to debate; they didn’t publicly bicker at each other; they didn’t lend a spark to light the fire. Instead, they treated a rather petty issue as just that. They quickly compromised on the promise to rename to airport after Medgar Evers and got it out of the way.

By naming the airport “Jackson-Evers International Airport,” the City Council left no room for any side of the debate to complain without being seen as overzealous and unreasonable. (See Medgar’s brother Charles Evers for an example of this.) The airport retains the name of the city it belongs to, which is very important considering that most people who need to travel to Jackson might have no idea where Medgar Evers International Airport is. The airport code remains “JAN.” Councilman Bo Brown summed up the decision not to use Evers’ full name when he said that other airports across the nation do not use the full names of those honored.

“Don’t re-invent the wheel,” Brown stated. “We don’t call Jackson, Mississippi, Andrew Jackson, Mississippi, do we?”

This can be taken as a sign that Jackson’s city leaders are learning how to deal with these types of situations better. It’s amazing what a fair compromise can do, and yet how hard it can be to reach one. It’s up to all of us—politicians, the media, citizens (of all races)—to view matters like renaming an airport or replacing a flag for what they really are: rather unimportant issues that just revive unrest and hatred. Only then will they go away, and that may be the biggest step forward that this city, this state or even this region can make.

Dylan McLemore is a freshman communications major at Mississippi College and has written for the Mississippi Collegian.

posted by Savannah Leigh on 01/21/05 at 12:01 AM