Five years later, Jefferson Davis statue still stands in KY Capitol without context
Nearly five years after a state panel voted to keep a controversial statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky Capitol and instead produce educational materials for the public about all the building’s statues, there still are no materials.
That’s longer than it took to wage the four-year Civil War that split the nation over slavery.
“I am not a least bit surprised,” Raoul Cunningham, former president of the Kentucky chapter of the NAACP and a member of the NAACP national board of directors, said Thursday. “I think the educational materials plan was done as a measure to placate us who wanted the Davis statue removed. A stalling tactic, if you will, until we went away. It’s a shame the statue is still there.”
It was August 2015 when the state Historic Properties and Advisory Commission voted 7-2 to keep the statue of the Confederate president and Kentucky native in the Capitol Rotunda, where it stands with statues of President Abraham Lincoln and three other prominent Kentuckians.
The panel, which then was all-white, also voted to produce educational materials about the statues to put them in their “historical context.”
Several civil rights advocates and Kentucky politicians have repeatedly called for moving the Tennessee marble likeness of Davis, who was born in Kentucky, to the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort or to the Jefferson Davis Historic Site in Todd County.
They unsuccessfully have argued that the statue of the leader of the Confederacy in the Civil War should not be displayed in the state’s seat of government.
In 2018, officials removed from the base of the statue a controversial plaque that called Davis a “hero.”
The uproar over the statue and others like it across the nation intensified after nine black people were killed in June 2015 during a Bible study at a church in Charleston, S.C. The alleged shooter had an affinity for Confederate symbols.
Steve Collins, chairman of the historic properties commission which oversees buildings on the Capitol campus and the state statues, said the plan for educational materials for the Capitol’s statues was “not designed to placate anyone.”
“They were designed to provide historical context to all the Capitol’s statues and not just linked to the Davis statue,” he said.
Asked why it has taken so long to produce the materials, Collins said there have been leadership changes in state government and the Kentucky Historical Society, which was going to be used to develop them, and definite funding for them has not been finalized.
Craig Potts, executive director of the Kentucky Heritage Council and a commission member who heads its Rotunda Committee, acknowledged at a meeting this week that “momentum has been slow” to produce the educational materials for the statues.
“We hoped to have already been finished,” he said.
Potts and Scott Alvey, who became executive director of the Kentucky Historical Society in July 2018, discussed at this week’s historic properties meeting ideas to expand the plan for educational materials for the statues.
They included using the nearby visitors’ center to educate the public about the Capitol, its rooms and statues; producing online information about the statues; providing more information on Capitol tours; and setting up a small theatre to show a film about the building.
Potts said the Rotunda Committee will meet before the commission’s next meeting, scheduled for May 13, 2020.
“All that sounds pretty good but I’ve heard such talk before,” Cunningham said. “Good luck to them.”
Cunningham also said he sees no reason for the NAACP or anyone else to ask the historic properties commission to reconsider moving the Jefferson Davis statue.
“With all the issues today, I don’t think that would get too far,” he said. “We’ve already been down that road. Perhaps something else will happen to revive that issue.”
A Bluegrass Poll in 2015 showed that 73 percent of Kentuckians favored keeping the Davis statue in the Capitol. Seventeen percent said it should be moved to a museum. It was unveiled in the Capitol in 1936.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 2:51 PM.
