It’s a part of the country where race was still a suffocating part of everyday life, where black kids and white kids went to separate schools (black kids went to the public school, white kids went to one of the “academies” set up so that white kids didn’t have to go to school with black kids), and where even the police tended to be segregated (the county sheriff and his deputies tended to be black, the town police chief and most of the town police force were white).

I like Balko, but I have to wonder how much time he spent there (granted I've never even been there). I didn't grow up in the black belt of Mississippi, but in South Carolina's. When I was a kid, we had the "academy", but it was expensive and only middle to upper-middle families could afford that. Public school was black and working class white. It was the same in my parent's time and it still goes on today. Given Mississippi's rampant poverty, I'm guessing it is the same there.

Erasure of white poverty or does Mississippi offer special credits for poor white family?

A recent Phoenix New Times report found that half of the six Confederate memorials in Arizona were built in 1999 or later, the most recent in 2010. The oldest of the six was erected nearly 80 years after the Civil War, during which Arizona wasn’t yet a state.

Then stop allowing the SCV to get federal cash for monuments. Those guys are like relentless termites when it comes to this stuff and no one else is interested in putting up new Confederate monuments at this point.

They’re about signaling opposition to the civil rights movement, or just plain intimidating black people.

Yes, and every new monument to Reconstruction and slave rebellions isn't about honoring the fight for freedom and equality, it's about signaling a change in local political ownership. It's all one man waving his dick in another man's face --it always has been.