THE EPISODE IN PICTURES

MOSES: I’m Moses Radford. Moses Lee Radford, pastor of First Baptist Church in Nicholasville, Kentucky. DAVID: And I’m David Swartz, a professor of history. I’m writing the biography . . . of a statue. A statue that stands on the courthouse lawn here in Nicholasville, the seat of Jessamine County, Kentucky—the county where we both live. It’s June of 2020—Covid times—and Pastor Moses and I are wearing masks as we sit talking in his church sanctuary . . . an expanse of purple carpet between us. Despite the distance, I can still see the twinkle in his eye. Like when he tells me that he hadn’t known the statue in the center of our county was a Confederate statue. Until . . . MOSES: . . . last week! DAVID: Even though his church is located just two blocks from the courthouse. MOSES: I didn’t pay any attention to it. I’ve been here for 29 years. I’ve been in the courthouse several times, of course, but I didn’t pay any attention to it period. Until last week, I read on Facebook a comment that one of the brothers made. There’s something in the courthouse yard that ought not to be, and I’m offended by it every time I go by it and see it. So I called the guy up that made the post. And I said, may I ask what are you talking about? DAVID: So it had no meaning for you until last week. MOSES: I knew it was there, but I didn’t pay any attention. DAVID: So now that you know what it is, what does it mean to you? MOSES: It means. . . [chuckles] Now that I know what it is, it mean a sign of hatred, a sign of bigotry, racism. It is a sign that that Blacks are inferior, and whites are superior. We’re the master, y’all the slaves. So now that I know it’s there, it give a sign of a lot of stuff that ought not be. And that’s the way things roll, when you find out what’s what. DAVID: The Confederate South lost the Civil War, but a rebel statue in Jessamine County, Kentucky, still stands . . . a century and a half later. And some local people don’t like it. PROTESTER 1: They need to take it down. It just keeps reminding us about slavery and all the injustice that was going on then and still going on now. PROTESTER 2: Why not put a statue of unity up here? Hell, I don’t care. Put SpongeBob up there, but something besides something that means something about hate. PROTESTERS: “Say her name.” . . . [chanting and honking] . . . “Say her name.” DAVID: As civil rights protests swept the nation in 2020, would the statue stay standing? PROTESTERS: “I can’t breathe.” [chanting and honking] “I can’t breathe.” DAVID: The past, as southern novelist William Faulkner said, is never dead. It’s not even past. . . . This is “Rebel on Main.” Episode 1: Hidden Secrets. I’m your host David Swartz. PART ONE: BLACK LIVES MATTER DAVID: This Confederate is imposing. He’s seven feet tall. Cast in bronze, he stands atop an eleven-foot granite pedestal. He bears a clenched jaw. Facing north, his piercing eyes survey the distance. His left foot thrusts forward, and both hands clutch a rifle and bayonet. If provoked, he would be eager for the fray. That’s how the local newspaper described him at his dedication in 1896. [Chanting] Fast forward to June 2020 . . . Black Lives Matter protests are underway in front of the statue. During the first week, the statue itself isn’t the target. Police brutality is. Just weeks before, a white police officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee onto George Floyd’s neck. For eight full minutes. Floyd suffocated to death. In Kentucky, Floyd’s death revived the memory of Breonna Taylor. A few months earlier, three white police officers burst into Taylor’s Louisville apartment. Her boyfriend, thinking they were intruders, fired back. Taylor was shot to death in the crossfire—as she lay in her bed. This happened just 80 miles west of my town. DAVID: [chanting] So I’m standing beside the Confederate statue in front of the Nicholasville, Jessamine County, courthouse. There’s a crowd of about fifty protesters. I’m hearing a lot of honks and support of the protest here. It’s amazing to think that this is a reality. DAVID: Here’s why I was amazed: Jessamine County is not New Orleans or Richmond or Charlottesville or any other liberal southern university town where statues have come down in waves over the last decade. This place is conservative. It’s fairly rural. The county seat of Nicholasville, where the courthouse sits and the statue stands, has a population of barely 30,000. This is horse country, full of stone fences, rolling Bluegrass hills, and lots and lots of white people. The 2020 census counted some 47-thousand of them and only 24-hundred African Americans in Jessamine County. That’s 4 percent Black and 91 percent white. And yet, they were saying her name. PROTESTERS: “Breonna was asleep.” “Say her name.” Some revving. “Say her name.” “Breonna Taylor.” DAVID: The protesters carried signs. And read them to me. JEN: It says. Well, I got to turn it around. . . . It says, “The American Dream is an African-American’s Nightmare.” NICOLE: “I understand that I will never understand, but I stand with you.” A MOTHER: It says, “No justice. No peace. Black lives matter.” TEENAGE GIRL: “Respect existence or expect resistance.” NURSE: It just says, “Black Lives Matter.” “With a picture on it . . . with a fist.” [engine roaring] WHITE MAN: “United States of Embarrassment. Brutality, racism, inequality, and shame. And just for good measure, I got Jesus on the back, just in case I get some middle fingers, I flip it around. WWJD. There’s no symbolism there. It is what it is.” DAVID: This was a curious protest. People were definitely upset, but there was a lot of humor—and even delight that an actual protest was happening here in this mostly white, southern, rural county. Maybe that meant progress was already underway. DAVID: Are you surprised at all the honking? WHITE MAN: I am surprised. Yeah, I’m totally surprised. Growing up, I went to school here. So like, I’m seeing interracial couples in the car, honking their horn. People of all colors honking their horn. And I’m like, oh my gosh, this is Nicholasville now. This is great! Twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have had this many horns. I would have been showing a lot of Jesus twenty years ago! DAVID: I spotted my friend Casondra down the street and asked her how she was feeling. CASONDRA: It makes me feel emotional just to have gone through all of the things. Growing up, you know a few different stories to schools and not feeling seen. And like the last couple weeks of being home and reading the social networks, it’s been drowning and almost feeling like who really can be trusted, you know, and I hate to feel that way, but I felt like who can I really trust? And then when I like got in my car and my friend invited me here and when I got out of my car, and I saw all these people, I was just like, people really care. DAVID: Tt the same time, the protesters were realistic. And they still felt racism in the county. SHERRY: Hi, I’m Sherry. Black Lives Matter because . . . we need justice. We need justice, and like they say, Black lives Matter. I got a young grandson. I’m afraid for him. I’m afraid for all our Black men. You know, and we shouldn’t have to be afraid like that. We shouldn’t have to be scared. DAVID: Next to Sherry was a twenty-something Black man named Lazarus. LAZARUS: Yes, sir. I’ve came here just because I experienced a lot of racism growing up. The extent of this town’s racism is extremely high along with police brutality. As a teenager I experienced a lot—to the point where I really didn’t come outside after dark. Even now, us doing this, I still feel nervous. DAVID: I asked Lazarus to tell me about his encounters with the police. LAZARUS: I would go out and have fun with my friends, hang around. You know, the police might get called. Just because you know, boys will be boys. Most of the time, seven, eight sheriffs come, hands on their guns, pull their gun out. I’m thirteen years old, fourteen years old. That happened frequently. I’ll get pulled over by the police. They’ll tell me I couldn’t speak, even though I know my rights. And if I did speak, they would tell me, hey, I’m gonna take you to jail. They get in my face, throw me down. It’s just non-stop. DAVID: He longed for change. LAZARUS: We’re all people. We all breathe the same. We all got hearts. It’s just that I got darker skin. And I didn’t pick that. I’m from this town. I love this town. There’s just a lot of hidden secrets about this town that nobody knows about. I would like for the whole town to be filled with unity instead of separation. You can feel it in the air. I just hate that. DAVID: Probably none of these protesters knew it, but these were not the first protests in Jessamine County over white treatment of Black lives. The story I’m about to tell was a new one for me too. That’s because I’m not a native of Jessamine County. Not even of Kentucky. I grew up in Ohio across the Mason-Dixon Line, a border that separated—and still separates—South from North. I crossed that line to become a history professor at Asbury University. Kind of like a twenty-first-century carpetbagger coming down South for a good job. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since—teaching my wonderful students and researching twentieth-century American religion. My books have tried to explain how evangelicals (and there are a lot of them down here in Kentucky) went from voting for Jimmy Carter in the 1970s to voting for Donald Trump in the 2010s. But during the pandemic, when we were all quarantined, I became fascinated by the history of my new home. What was fueling this Black Lives Matter protest? Where did this statue come from in the first place? What did it mean—what does it mean—for issues of race and justice? And so I decided to apply my historical research skills to this place—and to the biography of this statue. And Jessamine County turned out to be the perfect place to study race and the meaning of Civil War memory. Back in the nineteenth century, it was a deeply divided county in a deeply divided state in a deeply divided country. Jessamine County supplied equal numbers of Union and Confederate soldiers. Brothers literally fought their own brothers. And our county was a microcosm of the United States—more than any other county in Kentucky—or any other state, for that matter. This podcast is the story of my investigation into our divided soul. This place has a complicated history. Some of what I found was hilarious and bizarre—like our cross-dressing statue itself. . . . You’ll learn more about that in the next episode. . . . I also found a lot that is beautiful—like inspiring stories of emancipation. And I found terrible things—like excruciating stories of violence. This first episode captures both parts: the beautiful and the terrible. But the terrible is particularly excruciating. For sure because of the violence—but also because many of the good guys turn out not to be so good. And because this story implicates more than Jessamine County, Kentucky. It implicates the whole nation. Lazarus, that protester who had been harassed by the police, was exactly right as he stood in front of the statue. There are lots of hidden secrets. PART 2: CAMP NELSON DAVID: Our story begins more than 250 years ago—long before the Confederate statue went up on Main Street. In the 1780s Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature gave Jessamine County’s pioneers land grants for their service in the Revolutionary War. These pioneers struck out west through the Cumberland Gap and down Daniel Boone’s Road to wild Kentucky. They brought battle scars with them. They also brought human property. It was an unsettling combination: white hot patriotic freedom alongside Black unfreedom. AMY TAYLOR: I’m Amy Murrell Taylor, and I’m a professor of history at the University of Kentucky. DAVID: I spoke with Professor Taylor in her thirteenth-story campus office overseeing downtown Lexington. From her window, I could see the city block where enslaved people were once auctioned off. AMY TAYLOR: This was the Bluegrass. This was the heart of slavery in Kentucky. DAVID: Taylor means what she says about the “heart of slavery.” Nearly 40 percent of people in Jessamine County and Kentucky’s Bluegrass region were enslaved. What may make that so strange to modern ears is that Kentucky during the Civil War was also a Union state. I’ll say it again because it doesn’t fit our easy categories: Kentucky was pro-Union and pro-slavery. A quarter of a million Black people were enslaved here. AMY TAYLOR: In Jessamine County, an enslaved person was working in the fields cultivating various crops, including hemp, and was directly watched and surveilled and had their time carefully controlled, and they could not make the choice to leave at any time. DAVID: Everyone talks about cotton in the South, but harvesting hemp was just as bad for enslaved people. Maybe worse. AMY TAYLOR: It involved really hard physical labor, of literally breaking these hemp stalks and operating this very bulky equipment in order to do so. DAVID: After stooping in stifling heat to cut the hemp stalks, enslaved people stacked them in shocks. Each day they were expected to cut and stack an eighteen-foot-wide swath across the equivalent of sixty football fields. It was some of the hardest and dirtiest work imaginable. And if they couldn’t keep up, they could be beaten. AMY TAYLOR: They lived under the threat of having their family members sold down south into Mississippi through the slave trade. So enslaved people in Jessamine lived with all of the threats and the fears that were endemic to slavery. It was certainly not a better kind of slavery here. DAVID: Then came the Civil War. There were no battles fought in Jessamine County. Just little skirmishes. Still, the war made a huge imprint here. In July of 1863, the same month as the battle at Gettysburg, the Union built an enormous military base in Jessamine County. It ended up here because it lay on an important route that ran from Ohio through the Cumberland Gap and ended in Georgia. In fact, supplies went to William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who cut the South in half and scorched the earth on his march to the sea. AMY TAYLOR: It was a place where the Union is storing goods. It is creating wagon wheels. It is, you know, preparing and producing all of the things that this army would need in order to launch its campaigns. DAVID: Enslaved people cared about Camp Nelson for a different reason: emancipation. In 1864, as Sherman was moving on Atlanta, President Abraham Lincoln declared that any enslaved person in Kentucky who enlisted would be given freedom. Almost immediately, people began showing up at Camp Nelson’s gates. They told the clerks that they had “come to be free.” And they were impressive. A camp doctor said they were quote “the stoutest and most muscular men I ever examined.” At times, more than one hundred men enlisted each day. The atmosphere was electric. Elevated from slave to soldier, the men got paid for their work. They carried guns. Some even gave orders. They took classes to learn how to read and write. They worshipped in energetic interracial church services. DAVID: But not all was well. It turned out that not everyone at the camp was an emancipationist. Researchers now combing the National Archives are uncovering stories about Camp Nelson that are . . . less than inspirational. One of those researchers is Professor Taylor, whose award-winning book Embattled Freedom explores the experiences of Black soldiers at Camp Nelson. AMY TAYLOR: So there’s this great moment where they’ve enlisted. They gather at Camp Nelson. One group of them become part of the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry. And immediately they are put into action. I mean within days or even weeks for some of these men, upon arriving at Camp Nelson. They are sent into southwestern Virginia. They have not been trained. They have been given rifles that for cavalry were completely wrong and ineffective. You can’t load these rifles on a horseback. So they were improperly equipped. They didn’t have the training. DAVID: Not only that, the 600 horsemen of the Fifth Colored Cavalry are harassed by their white comrades. On the way to Virginia, where they had been ordered to take out the Confederacy’s supply of salt, their hats are knocked off by white soldiers. Their horses are stolen. They are taunted as cowards who would flee at the first sight of the enemy. With comrades like these, who needs enemies? AMY TAYLOR: They go into this battle. . . . immediately they’re overwhelmed. Many of them, if they’re not killed right away, they found themselves literally massacred when the battle was over, when Confederates went after some of these wounded men, or some of the men who had been taken prisoner, and they just violated all laws of war and just massacred these Black soldiers. DAVID: In the end, more than 70 died at the hands of Confederate soldiers and guerillas enraged to be fighting Black men. Most are killed as they lay helpless in makeshift hospitals. The atrocities are so outrageous that one Confederate officer is later convicted of war crimes. AMY TAYLOR: And so here was this moment that was supposed to be the great liberatory moment. And now many of them are dead. Or they’ve just witnessed this horrendous massacre. So freedom doesn’t quite look the way that they had envisioned it. DAVID: Back at home in Jessamine County, conditions weren’t much better. In fact, the local white response to the enlistment of emancipated Black soldiers was nothing short of hysterical. Slaveowners brutally attacked enslaved families. AMY TAYLOR: There was a woman. Her name was Clarissa Burdett, and she was married to a man named Elijah Burdett who enlisted in the 12th US Colored Heavy Artillery at Camp Nelson, and what she discovered upon her husband’s departure to enlist is that her owner was so angry about Elijah leaving that he was determined to take it out on her and literally beat her, beat her back until she was bleeding, you know, as retribution for her husband’s departure. This may have been the last gasp of a slave owner who saw his control slipping. But it was probably also done as a way to maybe pull Elijah back. It was a really agonizing situation for that family and reflected what was going on with so many other Kentucky enslaved families. So once enlistment started for Black men, some family members just went with them. They weren’t going to stay behind. They were going to test the U.S. Army’s resolve to exclude them. DAVID: The test did not go well. Federal authorities refused to give them food and shelter. So the refugees set up a makeshift camp, barely surviving in huts covered by torn canvas. They tried to make a living doing laundry for soldiers, but the women and children were devastated by hunger and disease. Many died—and then the Union Army doubled down. The bad guy here—the top commander at Camp Nelson—had an unusual name: General Speed Smith Fry. The archives I consulted don’t explain his name, but he stayed true to his name. Speed Smith Fry quickly got rid of the women and children. He expelled them, seeing them as a distraction from the business of warfare. In the course of five months, he expelled refugees at least nine different times. AMY TAYLOR: You know, if we could go back in time and interview Speed Smith Fry, he would probably say, “I was a military man. I follow the chain of commands. I follow orders, and I’m going to do what the military determines should be done for the military’s needs.” That’s what he would say. But there are plenty of military men who read the situation differently and were willing to exert a little more discretion and not follow orders and instead be humanitarians. I think one way to explain him is he’s a white Kentuckian slave owner himself. He’s of that class of Kentuckians who were loyal to the United States, loyal to the Union, but somehow believed that they could defend the United States and still protect slavery at the same time. And he was seeing that slipping away. And maybe he knew deep down that slavery was over. But he was not going to be one of the people that broke it down. He was going to protect it until the very end. DAVID: But the women Fry keeps expelling keep coming back. Even when he hauls them off to their owners, they keep coming back. They are determined to make this a war for their freedom, not just a war to maintain the Union. The situation finally comes to a head on Thanksgiving week of 1864. This is when the last, and most deadly, expulsion takes place. AMY TAYLOR: And Speed Smith Fry once again determines we need to expel them. And so he orders that they be rounded up into military wagons and sent out of the camp. There was the Miller family from Lincoln County, Kentucky. They had all fled together to Camp Nelson. The husband was Joseph Miller. He enlisted in the 124th USCT. His wife Isabella was there and their four children. And they were in the tent this morning when here comes the military official saying that Isabella and the children have to leave. And he says this with a gun in his hand. You know, he’s at the point of a gun. Here the family is told they have to leave—and so they do. They have no choice. DAVID: White soldiers even set fire to all of the huts. Having lost their housing, the refugees are in dire straits. AMY TAYLOR: So they climb into this wagon and they leave Camp Nelson and they head towards Nicholasville. DAVID: That’s the county seat where the courthouse and the Confederate statue are today. AMY TAYLOR: There’s about 400 women and children who are in these wagons moving towards Nicholasville. They basically get dumped at the side of the road several miles out. This is not only problematic because they’re now vulnerable to all these slave catchers that are around trying to return people to slavery. But it’s also 16 degrees Fahrenheit when this happens. It’s freezing cold, and they’re on the side of the road. Well, they find an abandoned meetinghouse, and they go in. And they’re able to make one fire for all 400 people, so it’s not adequate. They are freezing. DAVID: And they are the lucky ones. When a white missionary goes out to help the refugees, he finds a young mother who has just delivered a child in the snow. In one case, a refugee woman is caught by hostile Confederate sympathizers and returned to her owner. He then beat her to death. AMY TAYLOR: Later that night, Joseph Miller and some of the other soldiers go looking for their families and find them in the meetinghouse. And Joseph Miller, he walks in. He finds his family. But there is one of his children, his son, who’s lying there, having passed away. He has died in the process of being expelled. DAVID: Three days later, the devastated husband and father tells his story to a white Union officer. The officer, in turn, submits the story to his military superiors in the form of a legal affidavit. Joseph Miller’s testimony will have far-reaching political consequences—both at Camp Nelson and across the nation. But it’s important to pause here and reflect on the awfulness of this tragedy: on the coldness of death and the hardness of war. Here is Tracy K. Smith, former Poet Laureate of the United States, reading a poem based on the testimony of Joseph Miller. It’s from her 2018 collection entitled Wade in the Water. TRACY K. SMITH: Camp Nelson, Ky. November 26, 1864. The morning was bitter cold. It was freezing hard. I was Certain it would kill my sick child to take him out in the cold. I told The man in charge of the guard That it would be the death of my boy. I told him that my wife and children had no place to go and that I was a soldier of the United States. He told me it did not make any difference. He had orders to take all out of Camp. He told my wife and family that if they did not get up into the wagon he would shoot the last one of them. My wife carried her sick child in her arms. The wind was blowing hard and cold And having had to leave much of our Clothing when we left our master, my wife with her little one was poorly clad. I followed as far as the lines. At night I went in search. They were in an old meeting house belonging to the colored people. My wife and children could not get near the fire, because of the number of colored people huddling by the soldiers. They had not received a morsel of food during the whole day. My boy was dead. He died directly After getting down from the wagon. Next morning I walked to Nicholasville. I dug a grave and buried my child. I left my family in the Meeting house— where they still remain. AMY TAYLOR: When I read the poem I teared up. I mean, Joseph Miller’s affidavit alone is really heartbreaking. Tracy K. Smith captured this sort of essence about why that is, and I just think it was one of those moments actually that kind of took me out of my scholarly view of this. It’s not easy, but you strive to maintain some distance with what we talk about. And when I read the poem, I mean the distance had sort of gone away. You just feel it, and it’s tragic. Yeah, it’s heartbreaking. DAVID: Joseph Miller’s youngest son is just the first casualty. Over the next month, Miller’s other children die too. Their names are Joseph Jr., Calvin, and Maria. They are followed by his wife Isabella. And then Joseph himself succumbs to disease, lack of nutrition, and the traumas of the past month. Just sixteen weeks before the end of the war. Joseph had been the property of George Miller his entire life until he was emancipated at Camp Nelson. And then the Union Army—the Union Army—kills Joseph and his family. And so many others. Of the 400 refugees expelled from the Camp, 104 die. It’s a terrible true story made all the more terrible because it didn’t have to be that way. There were other options. AMY TAYLOR: I mean, there was Speed Smith Fry, who is this slave-owning Kentuckian, and then you have Theron Hall, who is a native of Massachusetts and was a committed abolitionist. So already they are on different ends of the slavery politics spectrum. Theron Hall is the quartermaster at Camp Nelson. He has been working closely with some of the formerly enslaved people there because he has employed them to work in all sorts of ways. Building roads, all sorts of tasks that the quartermaster required, so he got to know a lot of the people. And he knew once he heard about the expulsion and what had happened and that a child had died. He was determined that something was going to change. DAVID: Here’s how Theron Hall did it. Just three days after the expulsion, he takes down Joseph Miller’s story. He has the illiterate man, who has been prohibited from learning how to read and write by his master, sign the account with an “X.” And then Hall takes the affidavit to the Union commander of Kentucky. And he writes a letter vouching for Miller’s testimony. AMY TAYLOR: It was a public letter which in the nineteenth century was almost like what we would call like an opinion piece today. But it was in the form of a letter and it was not signed with his name. He grabbed an alias Humanitas. And he writes this letter that just outlines what was wrong about what happened at Camp Nelson. What was wrong about what Speed Smith Fry had ordered and his basic point was that Speed Smith Fry may have believed that he was carrying out military orders and necessity. But what he really did, Hall argued, was Fry had gone beyond the laws of war, had stepped outside of what was allowable warfare, and had committed cruelty against these families. DAVID: Hall sends this letter, along with Joseph Miller’s affidavit, to the New York Tribune. And then it’s picked up by hundreds of other newspapers with big circulations all over the North. A horrified public reads headlines like “The Cruel Treatment of the Wives and Children of U.S. Colored Soldiers.” Here’s an excerpt of one of those articles: SMITH: “Slavery is bad; but here is an act which transcends, in deliberate depravity and cool malignity, the darkest association of the slave mart. . . . Over four hundred helpless human beings—frail women and delicate children—having been driven from their homes by United States soldiers, are now lying in barns and mule sheds, wandering through woods, languishing on the highway and literally starving, for no other crime than their husbands and fathers having thrown aside the manacles of slavery to shoulder Union muskets.” DAVID: The public pressure works. General Speed Smith Fry, this Unionist enslaver, is overruled by the top military authority in the Union. The Black refugees are let back into Camp Nelson. AMY TAYLOR: The Secretary of War Edwin Stanton orders that new housing be created for these families. And then ultimately, members of Congress introduce new legislation to go even beyond that to declare free all wives and children of Black soldiers. And this legislation makes its way through Congress and is finally passed and signed into law in March 1865, just a few months later after this happens. So what that means now is that wives and children of soldiers in Kentucky not only can go to Camp Nelson, but they can stay there and they are now legally recognized as free. This opens up a pathway to freedom for an estimated 72,000 people in Kentucky. So this moment, this expulsion results in tangible change and results in freedom for many, many people all over Kentucky. DAVID: And then to the horror of Speed Smith Fry, Theron Hall is appointed superintendent of a brand-new refugee village. AMY TAYLOR: Life changes at Camp Nelson. They’ve built a village of about a hundred small cottages. They are sixteen feet by sixteen feet, built to house twelve people. So this is not luxury living. This is still, you know, pretty difficult living, but they are much sturdier houses with a roof. They don’t leak, at least they shouldn’t for a while. DAVID: By June 1865, as the war is winding down, more than 3,000 women and children are living in these cottages. Theron Hall oversees the construction of a hospital, a mess hall, a church school, a laundry, teacher’s quarters, and offices. AMY TAYLOR: This was really the beginning of a whole new place where Black people in central Kentucky can go live and live as freed people and begin building a whole new life apart from slavery. DAVID: When it’s told in Jessamine County, the Camp Nelson story focuses on this last bit. It emphasizes emancipation in big and beautiful ways. That’s good, says Professor Taylor, but it’s not enough. It’s important to uncover the hidden secrets too. AMY TAYLOR: We have to do the work of digging out what has been forgotten. And the story of Camp Nelson, the story of the long, protracted struggle for emancipation in Jessamine County is a crucial part of digging out what has been erased and forgotten. We have to know what happened before we can know where we want to go from here. DAVID: She sees eerie resonances between what happened before and what is happening now. AMY TAYLOR: Here you have a case where—and I’m referring to the son of Joseph Miller—the death of a young African-American male at the hands of the state. It’s not the police. It’s the military in this case. But still, it spawns at this point in 1864 a national outcry. You know, how can the government do this to its people? And how can you not see sort of the reverberations of that in the Black Lives Matter movement today? I mean, this is really an example of how state-sponsored violence against Black people has a long history, has been endemic. PART 3: THE CONFEDERATE STATUE DAVID: 165 years have passed since the end of the Civil War. That’s about five generations. As Professor Amy Taylor points out, racial tensions—and hopes for justice—are still running high. Even after all this time. Just one block away from the Methodist church, where the refugees had huddled as the snow built and winds howled during the expulsion, stands the courthouse. It’s an elegant brick structure with a classical portico. And on the front lawn of the courthouse, the Confederate statue stands guard. And just in front of that statue stand dozens and dozens of Black people and their white allies. The year is 2020. Calls for racial justice—and the saying of names—are starting up again. PROTESTER: Emmett Till. Eric Garner. John Crawford III, Willie Tillman, Michael Brown. Ezell Ford. DAVID: Further down the block, a Black woman wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” facemask, joins in the chants. JENNIFER: My name is Jennifer Richardson. DAVID: Jennifer has lived here for 18 years. Came from Evansville, Indiana. JENNIFER: Moving from Indiana to here. It was a big, big change to me. Really weird. I don’t know how to explain it. This is such a small town. Everybody knows everybody. It’s like the Black people stay in one area and the white people stay in a certain area. It’s almost like segregation in a way. And I really don’t understand that. All these years, and it’s still like that. It’s gotta stop. It’s ridiculous. DAVID: Eventually, I locate the protest organizer. Marceli, who’d graduated from East Jessamine High school two weeks earlier. Marceli is just seventeen years old. MARCELI: I felt pretty helpless with all the stuff in the world going on. A lot of kids my age aren’t allowed to go to the big protests like the ones in Lexington. I was signing petitions and trying to donate, but I felt like I could do more. So I decided to do this for our town. I started by making a little poster, and then I sent it to all my friends. They posted it on their Instagrams. My mom posted it on Facebook, and everyone just shared it and shared it. And I posted it every day. DAVID: When I talk with Marceli this hot June afternoon, she has no idea that a Confederate statue looms behind her. MARCELI: Well, I never really realized it. But now it makes me feel even more power to change a few people’s minds. DAVID: Perry, an affable young Black man wearing dreads and a blue polo, most definitely sees the statue—and he doesn’t like it. As he shouts into his bullhorn, he raises his right hand in a Black Power salute. It almost looks like he is mocking the statue. Perry’s salute mimics the soldier’s stance, whose elevated right hand grasps a bayonet. PERRY: You don’t see Nazi Germany stuff around Germany. You don’t see statues of Hitler running around there because they know man, that stuff wasn’t right. So why are we still in 2020 still having to look at Confederate statues and Confederate flags as something that was lost? That’s the most un-American thing you can do. DAVID: People who disagree with you say this statue is about honoring the courage of men who fought in battle. It’s not about slavery. PERRY: But it’s the meaning behind the war. So what’s the meaning behind why they fight? You know what I’m saying? We know the meaning behind why they fight. The meaning behind why they fight was they were trying to keep the South, the South. They was trying to keep slavery. So how was it not about slavery, if that’s what they was fighting for? DAVID: So what should happen to it? PERRY: Take it down. Take it down. Make a new day. Make our own history. Why not put a statue of unity up here? Hell, I don’t care. Put SpongeBob up there, but something besides something that means something about hate. DAVID: Nearby a fellow protester feels differently. He’s a white teenager whose name I never get. He’s a local guy who just got off work at Taco Bell. TACO BELL GUY: It’s probably a Civil War statue, I’d say, probably from the South or North. I don’t know which one. DAVID ON SITE: What does it mean to you that that’s up there as you’re supporting Black Lives Matter? TACO BELL GUY: Well, I believe that we should keep the statues up. I don’t see nothing wrong with it because it is part of our history. DAVID: Another white guy carries a sign that says, “I can’t breathe.” He too wants the statue to stay. PROTESTER 3: Well, we are in the South. That’s history, and history is history. As long as there’s not rebel flags hanging from it. [laughter] DAVID: A protester named Allen turns out to be a thirty-year veteran of the Jessamine County police force. ALLEN: I stand up for what’s right. I saw what happened to George Floyd—the injustice and cruelty of it. And I stand for justice. I’ve got several friends that’s African American. I consider them my brothers. DAVID: Allen hasn’t paid much attention to the statue until now. ALLEN: You go by it, and it’s just part of the landscape. DAVID: Do you know what it’s about? ALLEN: It’s a Confederate soldier, I guess. I would not be opposed for them removing it. It could stay as part of history. But if it causes somebody some pain and bad memories, then I’m for removing it. DAVID: The protests continue over the next couple of weeks. But the focus shifts: toward the statue as a symbol of racial oppression. The pastor of a nearby Baptist church quickly becomes an outspoken critic. Moses Radford has a full head of gray hair and a thick beard—and has been preaching and praying for forty years. MOSES: I was scheduled that morning to do a prayer of dedication for Lady Justice. DAVID: What Pastor Moses is describing here is a pair of Lady Justice statues that had been removed, refurbished, and re-installed on top of the courthouse. But he didn’t initially know which statues the local judge was talking about. Pastor Moses wanted to make sure that he wasn’t being asked to rededicate the Confederate statue. MOSES: Because if it had been, I would have then called the judge and said, “I’m not coming. I’m not going to dedicate anything that is gonna cause a major friction.” If Lady Justice had been a Confederate person, I would not be dedicating that statue. DAVID: That’s because of the history of the Confederacy. MOSES: You know, finding out more and more how things occurred in Kentucky back then. They really wouldn’t categorize it as a Confederate state. [chuckle] But they did a lot of Confederate stuff. There were so many slave owners and so many slaves, which led even after their freedom led to so much sharecropping. And it was just a glorified way of enslaving, because you didn’t get much out of it, you know. And so I just wonder why a lot of stuff was the way it was. DAVID: And why, Pastor Moses wondered, would Jessamine County want to memorialize that stuff? MOSES: By sitting right there, everybody coming in and out, and it’s there. It’s simply saying to everybody, we proud of it. Although on the paper, they say we’re equal. But that statue is saying different. There’s a whole lot of stuff we don’t want statues of. DAVID: Pastor Moses went ahead and prayed for the statues of the Lady Justices up atop the courthouse. But that Confederate statue down on the lawn had become a problem. MOSES: Sometimes things happen to draw your attention to it. And I run across some other folk who said they never paid any attention to it. Some people who have been here all their lives—but now they are. DAVID: It now felt like justice was being proclaimed up high but wasn’t being practiced down on the ground. The strong reactions by Pastor Moses, Jennifer, Perry, and so many others seemed to catch the county’s top politician by surprise. As I stood under the statue watching the protests, he emerged from his courthouse office. Recognizing him from newspaper photos, I approached. DAVID: Introduce yourself. Say I’m . . . JUDGE WEST: David West. I’m the Jessamine County Judge-Executive. DAVID: How long have you been in that position? JUDGE WEST: I’m in my second term, first year, so five years now. DAVID: Very good. So we’re standing here on a Sunday afternoon and lots of honking and energy in the air. JUDGE WEST: A lot of support for the cause, and I think it’s a cause of justice. DAVID: Judge West didn’t really want to talk much about the Confederate statue. He immediately gestured to some other statues at the courthouse, located way up high on each side of the building. JUDGE WEST: We put Lady Justices up on the courthouse after we’ve refurbished them. And gosh, I wrote something the other day, and I’m going to pull it up. DAVID: With that, the Judge took out his phone and began looking for the manuscript of the speech he had just delivered at the dedication. JUDGE WEST: These are some notes that I wrote. As we gather to return the statues of Lady Justice to our courthouse, it’s ironic the parallels of symbolism we can draw with the events transpiring in our country today. When the statues were removed, Covid hadn’t happened. The incident with Mr. Floyd had not happened. But when the statues were removed, we observed damage, holes, and deterioration from age. Our fiscal court made the decision to refurbish these statues, even though the cost was high, and the process was complicated. DAVID: The judge wasn’t kidding. The courthouse renovations took eight months, and the statue refurbishments cost $80,000. JUDGE WEST: We have fellow citizens. Our neighbors and our friends now that feel like our justice system’s unfair to them. And just as we had to spend some money refurbishing these statues, we’ve got to look at our justice system now, I think, in the same way. It’s going to be complicated. It’s going to be maybe costly. But we need a new breath of justice here in the United States, where our friends and our neighbors don’t feel like they’re going to go out and be punished for something just because of the color of their skin. DAVID: As the Black Lives Matter protests unfolded before us and before the Confederate statue, the Judge forthrightly condemned the roots of this injustice. JUDGE WEST: The Confederacy . . . many people will argue it was a war of states’ rights. But it never would have started if slavery hadn’t been one of those rights. And that’s an indefensible position. DAVID: Still on the subject of monuments, Judge West moved on to an even bigger one: Camp Nelson. Just two years earlier, it had been named a national monument. The judge was instrumental in that process. In fact, he was in charge when the announcement of Camp Nelson National Monument was made. JUDGE WEST: It took a lot of lobbying, a lot of things to fall in place at just the right time, but this is the best-preserved training ground for African-American troops in the Civil War. You want to talk about the civil rights movement. Certainly Dr. King was important, but this was the beginning of civil rights. Where Black men came to stand up and be soldiers and be counted as men. You talk about civil rights, right there it was born. We’re a sister to the Statue of Liberty. DAVID: But the Confederate statue was the pressing issue in this moment, not the Lady Justices or Camp Nelson. And the Judge knew it. In fact, he had just put up a sign in front of the statue. A sign that he now leaned over to read. JUDGE WEST: I wrote that text Friday morning. Because I saw the vandalism of Confederate monuments, and I thought this isn’t the best way to deal with things. We just have a little sign here that says, “Jessamine County is addressing options so this statue will reflect our values of today, which is justice in unity.” We could have been wordier with the sign, but I think that’s well stated. We want this statue to become a unifier, a symbol that reflects our values. It’s time—and past time—that we addressed this. Nobody walking past this statue from now on will feel like it’s a symbol of oppression or a symbol of injustice. DAVID: You think most people that walk by it know what it is? JUDGE WEST: I think almost anybody driving down up in Main Street would say that’s a soldier. They wouldn’t know that it was a Confederate soldier. In fact, I believe we have in the courthouse the text of the original dedication where the Daughters of the Confederacy said that we hope that our Union brethren also place a statue in the courthouse yard. Well, they may get their wish. [laughs] DAVID: On a personal level, what do you think should happen? JUDGE WEST: I would like to see us preserve this statue because even historians have described it as one of the nicest statues in our state. But let’s take the Confederacy off of it. Let’s remove the wording that would be offensive. I think on one side, it says that there was no greater cause. I think the consensus of today certainly is that the cause of the Confederacy wasn’t a great cause. I’m more than happy to work. In fact, I’m forming a task force. It’s going to address what we do with this monument. If we can repurpose it from a monument of division to a monument of unity, I think we’ll be able to have Jessamine County show our state, our nation, and maybe the world how you deal with something like this with love, with hope. I hope we could be a beacon to the whole world. DAVID: In my ten-minute conversation with him, Judge West uttered just about every conceivable perspective on the statue. He condemned slavery. He called for unity. He called it one of the nicest statues in the state. He opposed its removal. He suggested that the statue be converted into a Union statue. There was a sound bite for everyone from this consummate politician. Or was I being a cynical carpetbagger? Perhaps West was a leader who could see things from many perspectives and bring everyone together for a real conversation about the county’s history and identity. JUDGE WEST: I might get misty-eyed now, but if God can use me to provide some healing. He’s picked a weak tool, but he has strong hands to use it with. I don’t talk about my faith a whole lot, but gosh, I’m so humbled. I see this not so much as a problem, but what a great opportunity to heal. That’s what I hope these people are here for. I’m an older guy. I think we finally have a chance to look and maybe tell our police to look at the bad apples. We’ve got to have a system that gets rid of that. We can’t treat people with dark skin differently than people with white skin anymore. Man, I hope we grab opportunities and run with them. DAVID: Cocking his head, Judge West looked me in the eyes and continued. JUDGE WEST: Everybody thinks, oh, he’s just saying this. But there’s a heat in me. There’s a passion in me. When I ran for office, I started listing the things I’ve done. Kind of impressed myself! This committee, that committee, planning and zoning, parks and recreation, chamber of commerce, school committees, little league president. All the things that I’d done, I just did them for the right reasons. I’m trying to do this for the right reason too. As long as people’s hearts are pointed in the right direction. And from what it looks like, everybody’s hearts in Jessamine County are pointed in the right direction. DAVID: It would take many hearts pointed in the right direction to have a productive conversation about race and history. Because the gulf in Jessamine County was wide—and the scene unfolding before our eyes seemed ripe for ugly confrontation. On one side were the Black Lives Matter protesters chanting in front of us. The other side was just beginning to emerge. As the judge and I spoke, big pickup trucks began to circle the courthouse. They revved their engines over and over. I realized that they were protesting the protest. In the coming episodes of this podcast, we’ll hear about my county’s debate over the statue. Why do some protesters want to take it down? Why do others not care? Why, just months after the killing of Breonna Taylor, do counter-protesters resist its removal? Why, fifty years after the civil rights movement, are so many reluctant to say what Theron Hall said—that “Black lives matter”? Why, 150 years after the Civil War, does Jessamine County, Kentucky, still maintain a Confederate statue? These questions show that a statue made of granite and bronze is actually about flesh and blood. It’s about my neighbors. It’s about me, a sojourner from the North, and so many other newcomers who now live among them. Jessamine County is a southern crucible of social change. The fate of this statue depends on how we use Civil War memory to shape our cultural, moral, and political landscape. We’ll meet my neighbors on this journey. There’s a man named Brandon, who stood by the statue on a Monday morning with a handgun on his left hip ready to “defend history” from the protesters. There’s Jenna Sparks, a fifteen-year-old homeschooler who launched a petition to destroy the statue. There’s Stephen McBride, an archaeologist who has spent his career digging up some amazing history at Camp Nelson. Finally, we’ll meet the inimitable Bob Barney, a political activist who uses the statue controversy in Jessamine County to flip Democratic voters to the Republican side. It turns out that the past is not really past. I walk by the Confederate statue every year to pay my vehicle registration fee inside the courthouse. I drive by it twice a week to take my children to orchestra practice at East Jessamine Middle School. Each time I do so, it reminds me of my favorite quote. It’s by philosopher Alasdair McIntyre, and it goes like this: “We enter upon a stage which we did not design, and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.” I didn’t grow up in Jessamine County. Even the people who did wouldn’t design things this way. We’ve inherited this statue. We’ve inherited this racial landscape and a lot of hidden secrets. We’ve inherited a county, a state, a nation that has failed to reconcile the ideal of freedom with the reality of racial inequality. Our monuments—and our continued love and hatred for them—testify to the complexity of America’s past and present. And it’s up to us to achieve racial justice by remembering well. This bronze rebel on Main Street has much to teach us. If we’ll listen. OUTRO: Thanks for listening to this first episode of “Rebel on Main.” Special thanks to historian Amy Murrell Taylor, story editor Stephen Smith, audio producer Barry Blair, Poet Laureate Emeritus Tracy K. Smith for reading her poem on Camp Nelson, Highbridge Audio for their production of Wade in the Water, and the Louisville Institute for its generous support. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast—and leave a rating and a review so others can find us. For pictures of the Confederate statue, the Lady Justices, the protest, and historical artifacts related to the Camp Nelson expulsion, head to rebelonmain.com. I’m David Swartz. See you next time.