Racist trolls interrupt council session on renaming Lexington park after Black leader
A proposal to rename Lexington’s Cheapside Park after a prominent Black entrepreneur and leader moved forward Tuesday.
The Lexington Fayette Urban County Council voted Tuesday to put the name change on its docket. A final vote on the change from Cheapside Park to the Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park will come at the end of August.
But the discussion on the name change was interrupted by racist trolls who pretended to be citizens who wanted to comment on the name change and instead made racist remarks. It was not the first time trolls infiltrated Zoom council meetings.
During a June 17 public meeting to gather input on police discipline issues, some callers pretended to be Lexington citizens and then would shout racist, misogynist and homophobic slurs. During that meeting, the trolls interrupted the meeting more than a dozen times.
During Tuesday’s council work session, council members and Mayor Linda Gorton cut off all public comments after the second bogus call. The voices were similar to the ones that called during the June 17 meeting. Lexington Police have said they were investigating.
The council has conducted its meetings via Zoom for months due to restrictions on crowd size put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
The council voted Tuesday to suspend public comment until the city’s technology team can determine how to verify the identities of callers.
Why name a Lexington park after Henry Tandy?
A parks advisory board voted last month to change the name of Cheapside Park, which is adjacent to the former Fayette County Courthouse, to the Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park. The park advisory board’s vote is the first step to rename a park.
Tandy, a freed slave, moved to Lexington and joined Alfred Byrd to form the company Tandy & Byrd, which was a leading masonry contractor in Lexington. The company did the masonry work for the 1899 former Fayette County courthouse.
DeBraun Thomas, co-founder of Take Back Cheapside, told the council Tuesday that Tandy’s work is also in other key Lexington buildings and landmarks — including the Lexington Opera House and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. In the 1880s, Tandy began buying investment lots around town. He built and rented some of the best houses in Lexington’s Black neighborhoods at the time.
Take Back Cheapside pushed for the removal of Confederate-era statues of John C. Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan from the courthouse lawn adjacent to Cheapside Park in 2017. Cheapside Park was also the site of slave sales.
“Renaming the space is not going to change any of the things that happened there,” Thomas said. “It’s one step toward healing and reconciliation.”
Group: Lexington should apologize for slave sales
Take Back Cheapside would also like the city of Lexington to issue a formal apology for the sales of slaves at Cheapside Park. Thomas said he believed the city had to sign off on the sales of those slaves. Foster Ockerman Jr., of the Lexington History Museum, told the council Tuesday he did not think the city or county had to sign off on the sales of slaves. It’s likely that slaves, who were considered property, were sold in master commissioner’s sales. That was a function of the courts, Ockerman said.
Councilwoman Jennifer Reynolds said it didn’t matter if the city or the courts were involved in the sale of slaves.
“The point is that slaves were being sold in that space,” Reynolds said, and that land was owned by taxpayers.
Russell Allen, co-founder of Take Back Cheapside, said other cities — such as Charleston, S.C., in 2018 — had issued similar apologies.
Gorton told the council the administration is looking at those other cities’ apologies and will return to the council with a formal resolution. Take Back Cheapside has also asked the city to accept and display Fayette County lynching monuments from the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorial in Montgomery, Ala. There are four markers for four lynchings in Fayette County.
Allen said they are working with other groups that would help sponsor the lynching memorials. Allen said that effort will take more time.
Thomas said Take Back Cheapside would also like to see the space reimagined to make it more inclusive.
No one spoke against the renaming of the park to honor Tandy during Tuesday’s meeting.
This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 7:02 PM.
