Residents in Missy Elliott’s home town of Portsmouth, Virginia, don’t just want a Confederate monument to be taken down—they want it to be replaced with one of the hip-hop icon.
The change.org petition—addressed to the city’s mayor, vice mayor and members of city council— reads (in part),
[lborder]
Before she was “Missy Misdemeanor” she was Melissa Arnette Elliott, born on July 1, 1971 in Portsmouth, Virginia. Hailing from humble beginnings as the only child of a power company dispatcher and a welder at Portsmouth’s lauded naval shipyard, she rose to become a platinum recording artist with over 30-million albums sold. All this without even once owning a slave.
Getting this statue put up will be a lot of work and you may ask yourself is it worth it? I say yes and ask you to join me in letting us work it. Together we can put white supremacy down, flip it and reverse it.
[/lborder]So far, it’s been signed by about 25,000 people. You can go here to read the whole thing.