[2/11/04]Jefferson Davis, a federal official before becoming the only president of the Confederate States, shouldn’t be depicted on a mural at City Front, a speaker at Tuesday’s meeting of the Mayor and Aldermen said.

Today, Mayor Laurence Leyens said the city might have veto power over the panel, but “it’s not appropriate” for city officials to do so.

The mural project began two years ago, and the first phase is to end soon with the depiction of Davis and his wife, Varina, to be completed in March and dedicated in June. It will show them at their Brierfield Plantation on the day in 1861 a courier arrived to tell Davis he had been elected.

“That was part of Vicksburg history,” said Nellie Caldwell, co-chairman of the citizen initiative to place murals on the concrete floodwall.

Speaking against the depiction was John Shorter, a business owner, who is frequently on board meeting agendas.

“Due to the majority-black population of Vicksburg alone, the board should reject the mural because of the character of the individual,” Shorter said in a letter. He said Davis, who had previously served as Secretary of War for the United States, was a white supremacist, offering the quotation, “Neither education nor environment could counteract the divine intent.”

Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky and lived in many states during their careers. The mural would not be the first tribute to Davis here. He has at least two statues in the Vicksburg National Military Park, there is a Davis Bend in the Mississippi River and Jeff Davis Road leads toward the former plantation site, now in Louisiana.

Individual panels, costing $15,000, have had private sponsors, except another in the works a panel honoring the contributions of African-Americans will be financed through city funds.

The Davis panel is sponsored by the Vicksburg and Warren County Historical Society, which operates the Old Court House Museum. The largest gift was from Ray Neilsen and his wife, Nancy, who contributed $5,000 in honor of Gordon Cotton, director of the museum, who was one of Mrs. Neilsen’s high school teachers.

Cotton said he had talked to Shorter and they do not agree.

A more fitting subject for the mural, Shorter said, would be a speech Davis delivered in Mississippi City in November 1889.

“The past is dead. Let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations. Before you lies the future. A future of golden promises. A future of expanding national glory before which all the world will stand amazed,” Shorter quoted from Davis’s speech.

“I suggested as a compromise that they put that speech text on the wall. Everyone could take a sense of pride about that,” he said.

There is one introductory panel, but each of the other completed panels depicts an aspect of local history from the appearance of downtown years ago, to Teddy Roosevelt’s visit and bear hunt in 1902 to the first bottling of Coca-Cola by Joseph Biedenharn. The most recently dedicated panel honors the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic order of nuns who established a convent and school here in 1860.