The Murray city council thinks it’s time for the town’s Robert E. Lee statue to go.
So does Murray State University, the school’s history and English and philosophy departments, assistant football coach Sherman Neal II, and Ja Morant, a pro basketball standout who starred in two seasons at MSU.
But the granite and marble courthouse lawn memorial to Lee and local Confederate soldiers belongs to the county government, which has been reluctant to haul it off.
On Wednesday, several opponents of the statue gathered at the judicial annex where Judge-Executive Kenneth Imes and the Calloway County Fiscal Court met. The West Kentucky Star reported that the panel took no action on the controversial 1917-vintage monument.
Imes and the commissioners claimed numerous legal barriers would have to be cleared before any decision on the memorial could be made, according to the Star. The Star said Imes pledged to call a public meeting on the monument’s future, but didn’t set a time or date.
Neal asked the court to take down the nearly 17-foot memorial, which features a 5½-foot statue of Lee standing on a plinth atop four stone pedestals.
The [Civil] War was fought between two parties,” the Star quoted the coach. “One of those parties’ platform was the subjugation of other human beings. The man sitting on top of that statue was for the subjugation of other human beings. … He represents that subjugation. That’s something that we all have to reckon with every day.”
Blake Hughes of Murray defended the memorial. He suggested that Neal hadn’t lived in town long enough to have a rightful say about it.
Hughes also linked local opposition to the statue to nationwide protests against police brutality. “The timing is far too convenient, coinciding with the illegal and despicable destruction, burning, and looting of businesses, government buildings, and historical artifacts across the country,” Hughes said, according to the Star.
Recently, several people marched peacefully in Murray and also protested the Lee statue, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. A white man rolled down his car window and shot chemical spray at the crowd; another white man pointed a gun at the protestors. Police arrested both men, the Louisville paper said.
An effort to remove the monument failed in 2017.
Imes was asked about the memorial at a 2018 candidate forum. He vowed that the statue would stay as long as he was judge-executive, Murray State radio WKMS reported. “The only time it would be removed is by a majority vote of the fiscal court, I would act under their direction, or in the case of federal marshals hauling me off to Paducah and putting me in federal prison. They could do what they want to after that,” the National Public Radio affiliate quoted him.
Imes is a conservative Republican and a former state representative who switched from the Democratic party to the GOP. In 2016, Donald Trump won nearly 65 percent of the vote in nearly 92 percent white, largely Bible-Belt conservative Calloway County.
The city council had unanimously voted to name a committee to draft a resolution calling for the statue’s removal. The resolution was to be forwarded to the fiscal court.
The move followed a letter Neal sent to Mayor Bob Rogers. “The Robert E. Lee Confederate memorial statue … is an affront to all residents who support notions of equality and value the American justice system,” wrote Neal, who is African American. “The ‘friendliest small town in America’ must remove this symbol of oppression if the purported friendliness extends to its black residents.”
Morant, who plays for the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association, led MSU to the Ohio Valley Conference championship last year. He wrote Imes: “As a young Black man, I cannot stress enough how disturbing and oppressive it is to know the city still honors a Confederate war general defending white supremacy and hatred.
“We can’t change the culture of racism unless we change the celebration of racism.”
[click_to_tweet tweet=”We can’t change the culture of racism unless we change the celebration of racism. — Ja Morant on removing the Lee statue in Murray” quote=”We can’t change the culture of racism unless we change the celebration of racism. — Ja Morant on removing the Lee statue in Murray”]
Timothy Johns, an English professor, coordinated his department’s letter to Imes. The letter chided those who insist Confederate monuments reflect Southern “heritage” and not racism. “It’s about the history and heritage of lynching. And of Jim Crow Laws in the United States.”
The history department also wrote Imes. The local branch of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which helped raise money for the monument, represented “the Lost Cause ideology, which, during the Jim Crow era, sought to rewrite history by denying the central role slavery played in causing the Civil War,” the letter said.
It also said defenders of Confederate monuments miss the point when they claim that carting them away erases history. “Removing a monument simply states that society no longer sees what this person did as good and positive.”
During the post-Civil War, decades-long, white supremacist Jim Crow era, dozens of Confederate memorials sprouted on courthouse lawns, and in parks and other public spaces across the old Confederacy and in border states like Kentucky. Segregation and race discrimination, held in place by violence or the threat of violence, were the law and the social order.
Even before Jim Crow, a Lost Cause myth had arisen, largely revolving around Lee, the Confederacy’s most famous general. The myth held that “states’ rights,” not slavery, mainly motivated 11 Southern slave states to secede from the Union in 1860-1861. Disunion led to the most lethal war in American history.
The Confederates made it abundantly clear that they exited the Union because they feared that President Abraham Lincoln and his “Black Republican” party aimed to abolish slavery.
South Carolina, the first state to secede, besought the 14 other slave states — including Kentucky — “to join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States.”
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said he was glad the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”
Kentucky remained in the Union, although Calloway County — and the rest of the Jackson Purchase — was strongly pro-Confederate.
Almost all Calloway countians in Rebel gray fought under other Confederate commanders, not Lee, who was a favorite subject of many monument-makers. The memorials reflected ex-Confederates and pro-Confederate historians and journalists’ portrayal of Lee as a noble warrior who rose above defeat to help reunite the country. The Lost Cause myth became widely believed even in the North.
According to the myth, Lee had personally opposed slavery and secession but was “loyal to his state” and went with Virginia into the Confederacy. (His fellow Virginians, Gens. Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas, stuck with the Union.)
“The legend’s image of Lee is at odds with the facts,” wrote historian Alan T. Nolan in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. “He was not anti-slavery as the image claims; he was a strong believer in the institution.” (When his army invaded free state Pennsylvania in 1863, some of Lee’s soldiers seized Blacks and sent them south into slavery.)
Lee’s decision to throw in with Virginia and the Confederates “was not inevitable, but a calculated act of will in highly ambiguous circumstances,” Nolan also wrote. “… In the postwar period, he was less of a healer than he was a conventional advocate of Southern positions.”
Murray’s Lee statue is hardly as well known as the huge bronze equestrian statue of the general in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. It’s coming down with the blessing of the Rev. Robert W. Lee IV, a descendant of the Lee family.
He’s ready for the Lost Cause to be lost, even if some in Murray aren’t.
“I am fully aware that the broken, racist system we have built on the Lost Cause is far larger than a single statue, but the statue of my ancestor has stood for years in Richmond as an idol of this white supremacist mind-set,” Lee wrote in the Washington Post. “The statue is a hollow reminder of a painful ideology and acts of oppression against black people. Taking it down will provide new opportunities for conversations, relationships and policy change.
“….The new cause of this country is about justice, equality, peace and concord. We can and must be different. Now is the time to make this new cause the hope of this upcoming generation of activists. We can give the gift of Southern hospitality and community instead of passing on a pseudo-historical and oppressive understanding of the world.”
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