Teenager Emmett Till was 14 when he came down from Chicago to visit cousins in rural Mississippi in 1955. His death sparked the beginning of the long civil rights struggle.

George Wallace was railing against the federal government from his bench as a Barbour County circuit court judge in 1955.

That same year the Alabama Legislature created a college loan program to honor Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and appropriated $20,000.

That was good politics in Alabama before the state’s black residents won the right to vote. Honoring Stonewall Jackson was like a legislator being hard on crime today.

Supporters still tout the loans as a way to educate students about Alabama’s past, but when legislators created the program, it was more like pandering to the Ku Klux Klan.

Why the Legislature never killed the interest-free loans of $1,000 is baffling. Since 1989, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Fund continued to award 53 loans from the fund that in October had grown to about $115,000.

Like time, inflation has caught up with this anachronism. In 1955, a student could go a year to college on $1,000, which gave the fund a measure of legitimacy. Today, it’s hardly worth the paperwork to get it.

Keeping the fund alive perpetuates a past we would be better off not honoring.