Utah’s Dixie

collage by nicholas b jacobsen, feat. Washington County statue of Robert D. Covington

I grew up in so-called “Utah’s Dixie” (Nuwu land). Until I started this unsettling I’d never had an Indigenous, Black, or Brown Mormon-affiliated friend. I think these two facts are related. 

Many of my fellow settlers from Utah's Dixie will argue til red in the face that Utah's use of Dixie isn't about enslavement or the Confederacy, but strictly about the mission to grow cotton in these Nuwu lands in the Mojave Desert. But, one, this argument ignores the fact that the association between the word Dixie and cotton IS about enslavement, no matter when the Confederacy rose. And, two, even if the roots of Utah's Dixie weren't about enslavement and the Confederacy (they were) they grew to become associated, especially during the civil rights era when this church spoke in open defiance of the rights of Black people / Africans in the U.S. 

Gary Staheli, right, donates Confederate flag to Student body President Mel Bowler, left, and Doug Schmutz, D-Day general chairman

Dixie College’s Civil Rights era yearbooks feature images mock enslavement-auctions, white students in Blackface, and the Student Body Pres. receiving a Conf. Battle Flag. (The number of things named/built to memorialize the Confederacy spiked during Civil Rights Era)

Info from 2016 Southern Poverty Law Center study

In 1952, Brown vs. Board of Education is being argued
In 1952, Dixie Junior College’s sport teams start calling themselves Dixie “Rebels” 
In 1954, based on Brown vs. Board of Education, the supreme court rules that racial segregation in public schools in unconstitutional. 
In 1955, Emmett Til was brutally murdered and Rosa Parks is arrested for riding a bus. 
​In 1956, The school makes a Confederate soldier its mascot and other white supremacists in the U.S.'s Dixie bomb four Black churches and the homes of civil rights leaders King, Ralph Abernathy, and E.D. Nixon.
In 1960, Dixie begins flying the Confederate flag as a school symbol and Ruby Bridges starts attending a formerly segregated school in New Orleans. 
In 1992, people in Los Angeles rebelled after the cops who were caught on tape beating Rondey King were acquitted. 
In 1994, Dixie officially drops its use of the Confederate flag as a school symbol.
In 2008, while I was at student, Dixie College changed their Confederate mascot to a "Red Storm."
In 2012, Dixie removed their multi-figure bronze Confederate soldier statue in 2012.
In 2021 they're dropping the name entirely.

As Utah historian Will Bagley said, "The name Dixie reflects the sympathy that the southern Utah and the Mormon people felt for the Confederacy."

Bronze statue of Utah's Dixie founder Robert D. Covington

Robert Dockery Covington was called by Brigham Young in 1857 to lead settlers to Nuwu lands (Washington, UT) and grow cotton. Covington was chosen because he had experience in the field. Before Utah, he owned people and forced them to grow cotton for him in Mississippi. 

The Sheriff of Utah's Dixie Albert Washington Collins enjoyed entertaining fellow settlers with sharing stories about how he whipped and raped the people his family used to own, breed, and profit from. 

Both men were vocal Confederate sympathizers.

Covington’s statue stands in the Washington City Museum courtyard in a round of statues depicting founders of Utah's Dixie, right next to the park I grew up playing in, and to the chapel I went to church in.

Washington City Museum also has a statue of John D. Lee, the man held responsible for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but brought that statue inside the Museum.

​Why is Lee's statue hidden inside and not Covington's? Why do we white people seem to be able to be justly ashamed of ourselves for white on white crime but never the for the violences we enact on Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Asian peoples.