Jessamine’s Confederate statue sits near site of lynching. Time for it to move.
Jessamine County’s 1896 memorial to its Confederate dead sits just off center of the beautiful Italianate courthouse on Main Street. It embodies Kentucky’s fractured, often nonsensical Civil War history: Kentucky never joined the Confederacy, Jessamine County probably had just as many Union soldiers as Confederate, and the statue was purchased at an Ohio fire sale of a Union statue, which required retooling the soldier’s belt buckle from USA (United States of America) to CSA (Confederate States of America).
Like most Confederate monuments, the statue was Southern propaganda raised more than three decades after the war, in the height of racial terror throughout the South, when statues served as a set-in-stone reminder to Black citizens that while they might have been freed, they were still second class citizens.
Now there’s a movement to move the Nicholasville statue from its courthouse perch to the nearby Maple Grove cemetery, which has a section of Confederate dead, most of them from the Battle of Perryville. A petition was first started by a 16-year-old girl named Jenna Sparks who was horrified by the statue when she first walked by it at age 10; she’s been joined by several Black and white pastors and concerned citizens who worry that aside from the obvious racism, a Confederate monument could be the difference between Nicholasville being perceived as a delightful, bustling small town or a racially hostile backwater.
“We have to get rid of racist monuments,” said Sparks, who launched the petition after Nicholasville’s Black Lives Matter protest this summer. “It’s a sign of oppression and it doesn’t belong in our country because our country was supposed to be built on the idea that we’re all created equal.”
Sparks’ petition is similar to other attempts, some successful like Lexington, where the statues were quickly and quietly moved to the nearby cemetery; some extremely unsuccessful, like Charlottesville, Va., where a protest against moving statues ended with days of violent riots by white supremacists that ended with the death of Heather Heyer.
But advocates of moving the Nicholasville statue have some compelling arguments in addition to the usual ones, you know, that contend communities should no longer memorialize and celebrate the attempt to keep one race of people in bondage.
For one, the Jessamine County Courthouse is still a working, breathing institution, where people of all races go to get their drivers’ licenses, get married or go to court. As attorney and Jessamine County resident Peter Brackney pointed out: “This is an active courthouse, this is where justice is pursued — what does it say to African Americans that the Lost Cause mentality is there on display on the courthouse lawn?”
The other argument is named Thomas Brown.
‘Women Cheer’
Thomas Brown was a 19-year-old Black man accused of assault on a white woman and jailed in Nicholasville. According to newspaper accounts at the time, he never went to trial. On Feb. 6, 1902, a mob of white men stormed the jail and hanged Brown from a tree near the memorial. No one was ever prosecuted for the crime, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., which has researched and memorialized lynchings in every state. “Women Cheer Mob’s Work,” was one headline describing it.
Part of the South’s post-Civil War terror was falsely accusing Black men of looking or touching or attacking white women. Most of them were either judged guilty by a jury of white men or given a rougher justice at the hands of mobs. Brown was hardly the only one in Jessamine, or the rest of Kentucky, but his death lends a specially macabre cast to the Jessamine statue. Most people don’t know about Brown’s death, and why would they? It’s not memorialized at the site, and has only been written about in mostly academic tomes.
But the man who did a lot of that documentation, University of Kentucky history professor George Wright, said people might learn about lynch mobs but reject the reality because of the cognitive dissonance between our ideas of the U.S. as a just system of government and one that allowed mobs to mete out that justice on the branches of trees.
“The two of those go together, statues that symbolize white supremacy and violence to reinforce that white supremacy,” said Wright, who wrote “Racial Violence In Kentucky: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and ‘Legal Lynchings.’” “But many people won’t accept it because it goes against their ideas of this country.”
In addition, Jessamine has a particularly complicated history because it is also the site of Camp Nelson, now part of the National Park Service. The camp was a major training ground for thousands of Black soldiers who came to the Union outpost there, escaping slavery to join the Union Army in exchange for their freedom. Their wives and children followed, and were often kicked out of the camp. One expulsion from Camp Nelson in November 1864 resulted in the deaths of more than 100 women and children, which led to new laws that protected those related to Black soldiers.
UK history professor Amy Murrell Taylor wrote about Camp Nelson in her award-winning book, “Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps.”
“Camp Nelson really is a place of national distinction,” she said. “It’s one of the few park service sites dedicated to Black history of the Civil War, and the Confederate monument really works against it.
“It’s really hard when Camp Nelson represents the advancement of the cause for freedom and then you have this monument that is celebrating the subjugation of that freedom.”
A search for healing?
So far, there has been little official action or even discussion of moving the statue. That would have to come from Jessamine County Judge Executive David West, who is well aware of the political pitfalls surrounding the issue.
“I’m in a search for solutions that is healing and moves everyone forward,” he said. “I think the consensus seems to be that there has to be some action in this day and time. I don’t think we can retain a monument that is damaging to some people and in their eyes glorifies the Confederacy.”
At the same time, Jessamine County is just 4.6 percent Black, according to census figures. President Donald Trump won the county by 65 percent this time around. “Passions are very high on both sides of this,” he said.
Chris Ardery is a concerned citizen who favors leaving the statue where and how it stands.
“I think it should stay because it represents part of our history, good or bad,” he said. “If you erase the past, it will reoccur. That’s what we’ve got now.”
West favors the contextual solution, where the statue is reconfigured to show more of the history behind it. “We need explanations of epic proportions,” he said. “The public at large mostly aren’t aware there was a movement to create a revisionist history. How do we make this to where it doesn’t alienate the people who want it maintained as it is, yet move the needle towards healing and inclusiveness?”
Except it’s hard to get to inclusiveness with a statue that represents what was an effort to continue the enslavement of an entire race. A statue that memorializes hate while ignoring the nearby mob slaying of a young man.
“I know many of us want it removed,” said Rev. Moses Radford, pastor of First Baptist Church of Nicholasville. “Three times as many want it to stay. A lot of people who know it don’t care, to be honest, it’s just another piece of history they want to forget.”
Thomas Brown has been forgotten, but in the wake of George Floyd’s death, this country is slowly and painfully coming to grips with a history that it ignored. Of course, the Confederate statue should be moved to Maple Grove, replaced by a plaque to Thomas Brown as a reminder that sometimes, the United States is a country of justice and some times it is not.
Of course, it’s easier said than done. But it’s what Jessamine County powers-that-be should remember as the county grows, attracting people from all over who may not be as enamored with Confederate propaganda. Jessamine County, after all, hosted its own Black Lives Matter protest this summer, full of young people like Sparks who are beginning to come to terms with our past and future. It’s a future that doesn’t forget our most shameful history but doesn’t celebrate it either.
Jason Schlafer works in Lexington but moved his multiracial family to Jessamine County because of its high quality of life, excellent schools and friendly people.
“I love our community, it’s why we moved there 10 years ago,” he said. “That statue however, does not reflect the values of our diverse and inclusive community.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 1:05 PM.
