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Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library recently posted a proclamation from Governor Tate Reeves declaring April Confederate Heritage Month.
In his proclamation, Reeves calls on Americans to “…reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow…”
This is the fifth Confederate Heritage Month under Reeves’ term, but the tradition goes back decades in Mississippi. A neo-confederate organization called the Sons of Confederate Veterans successfully convinced Governor Kirk Fordince to declare Mississippi’s first Confederate Heritage Month in 1993. The SCV’s membership consists of male descendants of Confederate veterans who wish to celebrate the history and legacy of the short-lived Confederate States of America and its army.
Many people, from historians to the Southern Poverty Law Center, criticized the group for advancing the “Lost Cause” mythology. The “Lost Cause” myth is a revisionist take on the history of the American Civil War, insisting that the war was about southern heritage and liberty, not slavery.

The SCV’s website reads, “The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”
This conflicts with historical evidence from the war, including documents from confederates themselves.
The second sentence in Mississippi’s secession ordinance reads “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.” One of the reasons listed for splitting with the Union is the growing support for nationwide abolition. It reads, “It [the Union] has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.”
The lost cause not only downplays the role of slavery in the war, it was a key part of white southerner’s campaign to bring down Reconstruction after the war ended. The myth served to help many white southerners cope with the total loss of the war, and gave them a sense of justification for restoring the old ways of the south, including the white supremacist social order.
Historian Dr. Max Grivno specializes in the Old South and the civil war. Like most historians, Dr. Grivno rejects the lost cause as a myth. Further, he argues that it erases a key aspect of southern history: the history of enslaved black people.
“…Confederate Heritage Month, in celebrating the history of the confederacy, begins sort of by assuming that the history of white confederates in Mississippi, essentially a minority group, is the history of the civil war,” he stated. “And it obliterates the histories of the state’s majority, again those were enslaved black people.”
Azariah Russ, president of the Afro-American Student Organization at the University of Southern Mississippi, was born and raised in Alabama. As a southerner, she doesn’t feel represented by Confederate heritage or history.
“There’s a lot of things that we do down here that aren’t, like, things in the north,” she said. “I feel like there are different ways to portray the south other than Confederate Heritage Month.”
This proclamation comes two years after the state banned teaching critical race theory in all public schools, charter schools, colleges, and universities. More specifically, the bill prohibits these schools from teaching that any “sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin is inherently superior, or that individuals should be adversely treated based on such characteristics.”
The bill’s language is so vague that it can encompass virtually any teaching about American racial history. Many critics feared that this bill and similar ones around the country would have a chilling effect on teaching about race in American classrooms.
The main question on many people’s minds is why Mississippi still clings to this holiday. Perhaps for similar reasons that the original Confederates did. The lost cause myth absolves the south of its history of slavery and racism, and frames it as a heroic underdog in tragic circumstances.
It’s a convenient version of reality for people who can’t cope with a world that’s changing without their permission. Especially when that change proves their view of the world was always wrong.