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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

It's "Dixie" Not "Confederate Dixie"

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Basic Facts:  When junior colleges grow into 4-year colleges, and 4-year colleges grow into universities, there is a chance to consider name and perhaps mascot changes.  

More Basic Facts:  Utah is not monolithic.  The Legislature has a Republican supermajority.  Utah is 62.2% LDS.  .  

One More Basic Fact:  I, and most people I know, cannot move from where we live right now.  There are economic, social/family and legal constraints.  Please do not bring this up.  

I am interested in solutions, education, and exploring the issue.  I am not open to Utah nor LDS bashing.  

St. George, Utah is the beautiful small city in the southwest corner of the state.  Warm and sunny, surrounded by red cliffs and bluffs, with cottonwoods growing along creek banks.  Gateway city to Zion National Park, Snow Canyon State Park, and the range of the endangered desert tortoise.  The elevation is ~3,000 feet lower than the nearby Colorado Plateau, the local river is the Virgin.  The winter climate is mild, the summer climate is HOT, like Las Vegas.  

There is a local college.  

All the local media are covering this story.  I will be using two sources which are most familiar to me.  

There was public comment in November. The public comments were . . . puzzling and discouraging to me.  

Recently, the “survey” results were revealed.  There is Board of Regents action and State Legislative action coming up in the next months.  

Survey says, keep ‘Dixie’ – nearly 83 percent support name

The issue became fraught in recent weeks, pitting those who say the name is intended as a nod to the area’s pioneer heritage against those who contend both the name and Southern regalia once used at the school has painful associations to the Deep South and slavery.

“It makes us unique, sets us apart from any other place in the state,” he said. The name traces back to a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission to grow cotton in the 1800s, and the region is frequently called “Utah’s Dixie” throughout the state. Some of the area’s early settlers were former slave owners and slave drivers.

‘Dixie’ gets overwhelming support in DSC name suggestions

“The majority of the people want it, why do we listen to people who don’t care? This kid’s going to be gone in 3 years,” Dixie alum Maureen Booth told FOX 13 after Wilkins spoke. “We’re going to all still be here. We grew up here. We love this place.”

Today, the current Board of Trustees chose the name “Dixie State University”

Dixie State College keeping its name amid controversy

I do not understand how this happened.  So contentious.  So little understanding.  

I also want you to  know that the school mascot was originally the Flyers, and was changed to the Rebels in 1951.  Did the Civil Rights movement not reach St. George?  The school erected a confederate statue in the late 1980’s.  At the height of the Arizona & Utah controversy over the Martin Luther King Jr Holiday.  The school mascot was changed to the Red Storm when the college became a 4-year institution in 2000.  The statue was removed “for its own protection” the day after the public hearing.  In November 2012.

If the folks in St. George are so seemingly blind to what is obvious to me, are there ways I am blind to the obvious also?  I hesitated to write this – I thought, who am I, white gal in the city, to comment on this.  And I don’t know what to do at all.  I try to stay measured in my responses to my kids.  I talk about people being confused.  

I recently read “To Kill A Mockingbird” out loud with my son.  Sometimes it seems like not very much has changed.  And yet, there is always hope.  

The quote is from Theodore Parker in the 1850s.


“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

The St. George community is so invested in the name “Dixie” that they cannot see anything wrong with it.   What can I do to help the arc of justice bend more quickly here?  


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/ 10 Comments

10 comments

  2. Chris Blask

    Then we lived there again.

    Of all the various places in North America we have lived, Utah is tied for first in our preference.

    While stereotyping an individual is fraught with inaccuracy, as groups we wear some labels well enough. Where we lived the Utah Mormon portion of the population was a bit higher than 62.2%, closer to the everyone-but-us level. So I can say with some authority that the best stereotype for Utah Mormons is:

    Nice.

    I would say the same hold true for many of the demographics we have embedded ourselves in. In fact, Mooses will excuse me (and often not, which is OK) in saying that the more conservative peoples we have inflicted ourselves upon have as demographics worn that label more honestly than the more liberal.

    But if I had to pick a defining characteristic there isn’t another I would hang that sign on moreso.

    So why the attachment to Rebel and Dixie?

    I dunno, but I would doubt that it has anything to do with antagonism or other nefarious intent.

    Of course I live in Dixie now, and see more to it than a distaste for melanin. There is a flair of independence attached to the word, of romance and gentility. A certain sparkle of resistance to conformity, to folding to the pressures of judgement.

    So while I cannot say what the townsfolks of St. George are thinking, I would imagine that a perpetuation of human slavery is not on their minds.

  3. weatherdude

    My podunk town in North Carolina fought a really bitter battle when a drunk driver bulldozed a Confederate statue in a traffic circle in the middle of “downtown” a few summers back. The fight lasted almost two years — people were staunchly for or against the statue; there was little vocalization of a middle. People against rebuilding the statue were as diverse as they could be given a small North Carolina town, but every single person for rebuilding the statue was lily white.

    I grew up in northern Virginia, so it was weird being thrust into this freaky scene from the 1950s. The incident turned racially charged after supporters of rebuilding it kept saying “the people on the other side of the tracks;” the north side of my town (actually divided by train tracks) is heavily black, the southern side heavily white.

    The organization that actually owned the statue decided not to restore it, and now the traffic circle has an ugly bed of half-dead flowers where the monument to the Confederacy once stood.

    Down here in Alabama (in “real” Dixie), the Confederacy and Dixie stuff is so deeply entrenched that you just don’t question it. I mean, hell, they just put Roy Moore back on the bench after he was removed by his colleagues. What do I know. I’m just a Yankee.

    I never would have equated anything Confederate or Dixie-ish to Utah, though. That’s a new one for me.

  4. melvin

    There are plenty of Mo’s around here – as one critic says “How many do you really need?” – and I agree they seem quite nice individually. I worked for one for several years and he was a dream of a boss. The only thing that is mildly annoying is the cliquishness, but that’s not much different from a lot of groups.

    Many years back there was a viciously anti-gay referendum in Idaho. It actually got the least support in highly Mormon areas. This is reassuring. One would hope that people with a historical memory of their own very real persecution would think twice.

    When my kid was in high school, his best friend was one of the five or six black kids in town. This friend wore a hat with the Jamaican flag emblazoned on it and was hauled in by the imbecile administration – just trust me on that – and accused of wearing cryptic gang colors, etc etc. The kid went ballistic over the fact that he was being harassed while there were two or three pickups in the parking lot that had confederate flags in the rear window, which he considered hate speech. A number of his friends organized a major beef about all this. They did not win, but I was quite proud of their effort.

  5. HappyinVT

    First off how many people see the name “Dixie State College” and figure it is in MS or AL?  Seems a marketing fail from that stand point.  Second, seems like it is stubbornness/you can’t tell us what to do mentality versus some kind of racial thing.  Third, it is tone deaf but I’m guessing their target student body doesn’t much care.

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