Beshear expects panel to approve removal of Jefferson Davis statue from Capitol
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Thursday he expects a state panel that oversees statues in the Capitol to approve his request Friday to remove the controversial statue of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis from the Rotunda.
“It is long past due,” he said during his regular news conference to update Kentuckians on the coronavirus pandemic.
Beshear said he has talked to members of the Historic Properties Advisory Commission and expects a bipartisan vote for removal of the statue. He said it is likely to go to the Jefferson Davis state historic site in Todd County, where the Confederate leader was born.
If the 14-member panel approves the removal, Beshear said there will be immediate steps to remove the statue from the Capitol, where it has been since it was unveiled on Dec. 10, 1936. A ladder and a measuring tape were spotted earlier Thursday near the 15-foot-tall marble statue.
Beshear said there are three options once the statue is removed: allow extra seating capacity in the Rotunda, choose a replacement statue or offer a rotation of statues in the spot.
A news release from the State Historic Properties Advisory Commission Thursday said the panel’s chairman, Steve Collins, will hold the special meeting at 1 p.m. Friday to consider the future of the Davis statue. Collins, in a brief interview, said he did not know how the vote will go.
Beshear said last week that the Davis statue is a divisive symbol and should be removed.
John Suttles of Paducah, a past commander of the Kentucky division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, said Thursday that Beshear “has to think he has the votes or he would never have called the meeting.”
“What gives him the right to destroy history?” Suttles asked. “He thinks he is a god. That board should be preservationists, not destructionists.”
Suttles said his group would not take the removal of the Davis statue “lying down.” He said a lawsuit is possible.
Raoul Cunningham, with the NAACP in Kentucky, has pushed for removal of the statue for nearly 20 years, saying the seat of state government should not be the site of a statue of a man “who turned against the United States and promoted a group of states that wanted to preserve slavery.”
The Confederacy was made up of 11 states that seceded from the United States in 1860 following the election of President Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War lasted from 1861 and 1865 and marked the end of slavery in the United States.
The state Historic Properties Advisory Commission voted in 2015 to keep the statue but provide educational materials for all the statuary in the Capitol. That has not yet occurred. It decided in 2017 to remove a plaque from the statue calling Davis a hero.
The 14 members of the panel are appointed by the governor for staggered terms, but Beshear has not appointed all of them. Members include the state curator, the director of the Kentucky Historical Society and the director of the Executive Mansion. Kentucky first lady Britainy Beshear is as an honorary member.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the commission’s special meeting Friday will be held via video teleconference. Public access to the meeting will be available at historicproperties.ky.gov
Beshear, a Democrat, called for the removal of the Davis statue in last year’s race for governor. His position got more vocal as recent protests have occurred in Kentucky and across the nation against racial injustice.
Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the first black person to hold that office, also said last week he thinks the statue should be relocated. Several other political leaders, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have expressed the same sentiments.
Earlier Thursday, state Senate budget chairman Chris McDaniel, R-Taylor Mill, called for the Davis statue to be replaced by Carl Maxie Brashear, a native of Tonieville in LaRue County who became the first black U.S. Navy Master diver in 1970 after losing his left leg in an accident four years earlier. The film “Men of Honor” was based on his life.
“Certainly I think you would be hard pressed to find someone more deserving and extolling the virtues we want to extol than Master Chief Brashear,” McDaniel said earlier Thursday at the Capitol.
Asked why he is pushing this now, McDaniel said, “I think a lot of us believed at the time that there was a place for the preservation society to play the role that was statutorily envisioned, clearly that has not played out as of yet. Sometimes you wait on people and sometimes you direct them and it’s time to direct them.”
Also, O.J. Oleka, co-founder of Anti-Racism Kentucky, an organization that works to eliminate institutional racism, said Thursday the statue of Jefferson Davis is “a symbol of a time when the message was clear that black life had less value.”
He said all other statues in the Rotunda are men who “contributed to their time to try and make society better.”
This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 12:35 PM.
