PART ONE: HOMESCHOOLED RADICAL DAVID: The past, said William Faulkner, isn’t dead. It’s not even past. I’m David Swartz. This is “Rebel on Main.” Episode Four: Jenna’s Petition. With her designer glasses and pixie cut with red highlights, she seemed . . . an unlikely radical. JENNA: My name is Jenna Sparks. I am 15 years old. I’ll be 16 next month. DAVID: That’s an age when most young women are preoccupied with things other than statues. JENNA: Well, a few years back, I don’t remember how many years back, I was walking with my mom. DAVID: Their walk took them away from their little white house. Off the porch where Jenna and I were now sitting. Down the sidewalk toward the Jessamine County courthouse, just two blocks away. JENNA: And we noticed a statue. And we had never really looked at the statue. So we went up to the statue and looked at it. And we were just so appalled by what it said. And, like, every time I saw it, I was appalled by it. DAVID: This is not the reaction I expected. Especially given Jenna’s background. She tells me she’s descended from a Confederate soldier who named his son Jeptha . . . Jefferson Davis . . . Sparks. The name honored the leader of the Confederacy . . . President Jefferson Davis. Jenna is also homeschooled, an educational path sometimes taken by conservatives who sometimes sympathize with the Lost Cause. JENNA: I was reading about the Civil War, actually in school earlier this year. DAVID: School for her is called Abeka. It’s a homeschool curriculum that has come under fire for the way it tells history. As she paged through her American history textbook, Jenna could see why. JENNA: And they kept praising the Confederate soldiers for what amazing Christians they were and how amazing they were. And like, they made them to be the martyrs. . . . I was like, Mom, I hate this book. Like, I was just furious. DAVID: Two recent events had made Jenna so mad. First, her family welcomed a new member. JENNA: I have a cousin and he is adopted, and he’s biracial. . . . So like, I was always just very, I don’t know, I never cared about the color of anybody skin or their ethnicity, except to think, “Oh, my goodness, you are just that much more beautiful. Your hair is gorgeous.” Or “I can't believe how amazing your skin is”-type things. DAVID: Second, she encountered a very different historical narrative of the Civil War. When her school year ended—a little early that year because the Sparks family had a new baby—she continued studying history on her own. She was especially drawn to the work of historian Heather Cox Richardson. JENNA: Okay, I love her. I listened to her talk about the American paradox and how we were founded on the basis that all men are created equal. But when it was fleshed out, Black men, Asians, and women were not created equal, basically, in their minds. DAVID: This more sober rendering of American history contrasted sharply with what Jenna had been encountering in her home school. JENNA: And so like reading all of my history books and stuff made me really angry. DAVID: Jenna’s historical awakening coincided with the killings in 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. And with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed here in Jessamine County. JENNA: We walked down to get some pictures of the statue because we were going to post on Facebook about it. And there’s some protesters down there when we walked. And so, um, we started talking to them, like, have you ever noticed the statue, blah, blah, blah. And one of the girls was like, “Do you guys have a petition started?” And we were like, “No, but that’s good idea.” DAVID: It’s one thing to make a historical judgment. To declare that a Confederate monument does not represent the truth about history. It’s different to actually do something about it. Jenna got right to work. JENNA: I have nothing else to do. Like, I mean, I’m a teenager. Why not make a difference instead of just sitting around watching television. . . . So I came home that night, and I was up till like midnight, I think, just finding templates and stuff. And then I wrote my petition. DAVID: The date was July 4. JENNA: “Today is Independence Day.” DAVID: This is Jenna reading her petition, which she posted online. JENNA: “But this day only marks the independence of white people. Please sign my petition and share it with your friends as an act of supporting freedom for all. Let’s celebrate freedom, not slavery!” DAVID: The petition had a sharp edge, especially at the end. JENNA: “This statue, which proudly honors the rebel traitors of the Confederacy, is a disgrace not only to our town, but to our country, and the world. We as a nation should not honor those who tried to destroy us, and who wished to oppress others. Though it never should have been erected in the first place, and should have been taken down years ago, now, in light of current events it is the perfect time to have memorial both removed and destroyed.” DAVID: This was an idealistic—and frustrated—teenager. Jenna wanted that statue down—and not just removed but destroyed. I told her that I had talked with Judge West . . . who told me he wanted it to remain and to represent all Civil War soldiers. I also told Jenna that others wanted it moved to the Confederate plot at the nearby Maple Grove Cemetery. JENNA: I disagree completely, because we are not erasing history by getting rid of it. Germany—so many people have actually tried to use this as an argument to keep the statue. They’re like, well, in Germany, they kept the concentration camps. But they’re keeping the concentration camps to show how evil it was, not to celebrate it. . . . They won’t fly Hitler’s flag anymore. Yeah, they won’t. But here like, I mean, we have people everywhere you go, who have Confederate flags. Because we have so much racism here in Kentucky, nobody’s going to look at it as, “Oh, I’m remembering how awful these people were.” No, they’re going to think, “Oh, that’s my heritage. Those are my ancestors. Go you! If only it was still the good old days good old South. . . . So I don’t agree with moving it, keeping it there, or doing anything but demolishing it. DAVID: The petition got a flurry of signatures and supportive comments. Most were local. One person wrote, “My children are biracial, and we live up the street from this reminder.” Others had moved out of state. Someone from Virginia wrote that he was a Black man born and raised in Nicholasville. It’s a shame, he said, that his people still have to walk by “a statue that commemorates the atrocities of Black oppression . . . just to renew their vehicle tags.” Jenna had struck a nerve. As we talked on her front porch, it had only been a few days since she posted the petition. But the support she was getting was already impressive. JENNA: As of, like, an hour ago, we have 394 signatures altogether. DAVID: Over the next weeks, Jenna became a minor local celebrity. As signatures continued to pour in, she was profiled in the local newspaper, the Jessamine Journal, with a huge picture of her on the front page. Her campaign was gaining steam, and a coalition was building. [music cue] Ironically, it was a statue celebrating division that was bringing people together. PART TWO: MINISTERS ON THE MARCH DAVID: One reason why so many petition signatures poured in was Moses Radford. MOSES: So then I found out Friday that a petition was already going around. I said great! You know . . . I took that link and sent it out to thirty-some people immediately. [huge laugh] DAVID: We’ve already met Pastor Moses. He’s the minister who publicly prayed at the dedication of the two Lady Justice statues recently refurbished and installed on top of the courthouse. He was happy to perform that ministerial task. But he wasn’t ok with only that. Pastor Moses is done telling just sanitized history. He wants to tell the whole truth about monuments at the courthouse. Including the Confederate statue. MOSES: Now that I know what it is . . . it’s a sign of hatred, a sign of bigotry . . . racism. It’s a sign that that Blacks are inferior, and whites are superior. We’re the master, y’all the slaves. DAVID: It’s Sunday morning. A day after the Black Lives Matter protests in Nicholasville. And a day before Brandon will guard the statue with a gun on his hip. Pastor Moses stands before his congregation. He has some updates. First, he announces that he has been appointed by Judge West to be on a committee that will figure out what to do with the statue. Second, he praises the anti-statue petition and its author Jenna Sparks. MOSES: The white young lady. She started it. And we encourage her in doing so. And we are promoting it, trying to get that signed. DAVID: Third, he tells his congregation that he has been meeting with Black ministers across the county—and that they are going to invite white ministers to join them. MOSES: We will have them to come to us, to our church. And we’ll sit down and have a dialogue about some racial issues. . . . They want to know how to deal with it. And I commend the brothers for doing that. . . . I say you right. If you want to understand how I feel, if you want to have understanding about racial issues, you need to ask Black folk. Amen. . . . It’s sort of like a man trying to explain the pain of giving birth of a baby. You know, we ain’t been there! . . . We don’t know anything about the pain and struggles within. Same thing with this racial issue. And folks who think there is no problem, they’re blind. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to see that there’s a problem. DAVID: In several conversations with me over the next weeks, Pastor Moses explains in more detail his concerns about the statue. MOSES: History is good to know. Sometime make you want to go back and undo some stuff, but it’s there. DAVID: It’s good to know good history. That’s why he likes some of the statues at the courthouse. MOSES: On top of the courthouse. We have Lady Justice. DAVID: But it’s down at ground level that stuff needs undoing. MOSES: In front of the courthouse, we have injustice. We have racism. We have slavery. We have white supremacy. DAVID: And people aren’t willing to talk about it. Pastor Moses is aggravated with the nice white Christians in Jessamine County who don’t want to talk about racism . . . past or present. MOSES: The main reason why I will say most white Christians say it’s not there. Because they don’t want it to be there. They don’t want to see it. They don’t want to see. DAVID: To Pastor Moses, the Confederate statue represents the white supremacist world that put it up more than a century ago. A world, he says, that to some degree still operates in Jessamine County. MOSES: They still want the black man to feel inferior. But I learned a long time ago that I’m not. And I will not be intimidated by white folk or black folk, red or yellow, black or white. Don’t matter to me. You know, because I know who I am—and whose I am. . . . And I know God has given me the strength and given me the knowledge and given me the power to stand on his word. And his words let us know that from one blood he made all nations. Our skin color is different, but our blood is still the same color. When it hit the air, it red. [chuckle] DAVID: Pastor Moses launches his own campaign. Convinced that the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have taken the country to a crisis point, he turns to social media to re-educate Jessamine County about its past. He posts multiple times a day, thanking “all white brothers and sisters for checking in on me.” He posts stories of prejudice he has experienced as a child and an adult. He posts prayers beseeching God to end racism and for Confederate flags and statues to be removed. He warns of voter suppression. All this in between live video Bible studies and messages reminding his parishioners to stay out of debt. All the while, he considers what to do next. MOSES: I really doing some praying about how to do things . . . cuz I don’t want things to . . . blow up. I don’t want fights. I definitely don’t want anybody to lose their lives over any anything period. Because we have had too much of that happen over the years. DAVID: His biggest opening comes almost immediately. MOSES: I had some white pastors to reach out to me. Even one stop right here at my house. DAVID: That’s where Pastor Moses and I are talking—on his front porch in what used to be the segregated Black section of Nicholasville . . . a place called Herveytown. He recalls that conversation with the white pastor. MOSES: Aren’t you Moses Radford? Yes, I am. And he introduced himself. And he let me know where he pastored. And he wanted to say that I really want a better understanding about racism. And I figured the best thing for me to do is talk to Black people about it. Yes, that is the best way to find out about it. So then I had other phone calls, letters written to me. People began to reach out. DAVID: One of them is Max Vanderpool, the pastor of a majority-white church on the south side of Nicholasville. MAX: I moved here in ‘92, from Wheaton, Illinois, white suburb of Chicago, but it was Chicago. I was floored at what Kentucky was like. Like in this town, literally there was one street, and if you were black, you did not live on the other side of that street. It was that demarked. I remember going down Maple Street. DAVID: Pastor Moses lives on Maple Street. MAX: Which at the time, like in the evening, you would see that the people of color were out on their porches. And it was on that street, and I just remember thinking, wow, like, I was not prepared for that. DAVID: Ever since, Max has been trying to understand racial dynamics in Jessamine County. Part of that effort has been to invite Black pastors to county-wide meetings of ministers. MAX: I would reach out consistently to Moses and other pastors of color in the community. They were always polite, but the answer was always no. It never dawned on me to ask why. So I feel bad, on my part, for never going, you know, this is the third time you said no. . . . Like, what’s the story? Tell me. And I never did. And I’ve heard the stories now. I won’t name the churches, but a pastor of a particular church, and just blatant racist stuff that was part of the ministerial association. And I wouldn’t go back if I were a Black pastor either. So, like, I get it. I just didn’t know it. DAVID: A second difficulty is time. Being a pastor is not Pastor Moses’s only job. On the side, he’s a substitute teacher in the local schools. MOSES: Of course, I’ve been subbing off and on for 30 years. . . . I did a whole day yesterday at JCTC West Campus. The day before that I was half a day at West High. DAVID: Pastor Moses is busy—all week long. And this limited his involvement in the ministerial meetings. MAX: When the ministerial association was active, it was always on a weekday. DAVID: So Pastor Moses is planning his racial concerns gathering for the only time slot possible: Sunday afternoons. MAX: That’s the one window that they can give up, and they’re giving it up for their white pastor colleagues. . . . So like, it’s three o’clock, it’s a Sunday afternoon. Every white pastor who came into that meeting had had lunch, many of them had taken a nap. And after this meeting, they were done for the day. DAVID: Not so for the Black pastors, who had just finished presiding over their church services. MAX: Every single black pastor came into that meeting still in his suit, having just come from the last little bit of tidying up from service. DAVID: A service, undoubtedly, that was much, much longer than their white counterparts! MAX: And was going to devote the window of time that he had on Sunday before he had to go back for Sunday evening service. That was not lost on me. What they were giving and sacrificing to have these conversations. Not lost on me at all. MOSES: My thing is if the ministers can’t deal with it racial issues, no need expecting people to deal with it. DAVIDThe meetings convened by Pastor Moses marked the first time that many Black pastors and white pastors in the community had ever really met. And it showed. By all accounts, the first meeting—a gathering with little precedent in this historically segregated county—felt guarded and awkward. Twenty-five ministers, masked and socially distanced because of Covid, began the hard work of getting to know each other in the pews of Radford’s church. MOSES: The very first one we had in July 2020. It was tense in here. DAVID: Here’s how he began: MOSES: How many of you all know that there are racial issues in Jessamine County? Some people raised their hand. So I said some of you are raising your hand. Some of you didn’t. That let me know that some of you not aware of racial issues. Some of the leaders actually admitted they were not aware because they had only been in their circle. In their circle, there was no problems. [chuckle] You know, because their circle was white. And if they knew any Blacks, they have no problem with them because they were friends. But then I asked the probing question, which was how did you feel when you saw the video of the white police officer with his knee in George Floyd’s neck, taking his life away from him. People got to talking. DAVID: Most said the images were demeaning and sinful and made them feel upset. But not everyone. MOSES: One brother was saying that the police was doing what he’s supposed to do. And I saw the expression on another brother’s face. And I said, Lord, please hold him, hold him, please hold him. DAVID: Trying to defuse the tension in the room, Pastor Moses paired white and Black ministers and told them to share their testimonies. Even so, the initial exchanges were tentative—Black ministers not sure what was safe to say, white ministers not sure how to talk about sensitive racial issues. MAX: And they’re sitting and listening to stuff, some of which, you know, is probably offensive, and they’re nevertheless gracious and kind. And they listen. DAVID: Over the next hour and a half, many found common ground. Here’s Marlend Fain, pastor of the Cedar Top Baptist Church in Wilmore. MARLEND: You’re sitting there talking to the minister and asking him, “Hey, what are some of your concerns with your church right now?” You’re like, “Okay, well, you know, you’ve got a majority white church with 600 people, but your concerns are the same as mine, which is majority black and maybe 150 people.” You start seeing that some of this is more the same than different. And I think that’s important. DAVID: Here’s Father Justin Patterson, the priest at St. Athanasius, an Orthodox Church with Russian roots located behind the Wal-Mart. He carries the burdens of his parishioners in his heart, he told me. JUSTIN: And I heard Radford and Gates talk about the same stuff, like, these are their people. You can tell the panic they feel for their people. And I relate to that entirely. That actually really impacts me to hear that. I know what a pastor sounds like, right? They’re real pastors. DAVID: By the end, the mood had completely shifted. The ministers wouldn’t leave. MOSES: It was sort of like having a church service that you pronounce the benediction to have everybody go home. But they don’t go because the service was so enjoyable. They stand around, keep talking to each other. That’s what happened Sunday. DAVID: Do you remember anything quite like this? MOSES: Never, never, never, never. . . . Because we actually . . . laughing, joking, cutting up with each other. And yes, on Sunday was the first time that some of us even met one another. . . . Many of the white preachers said, can we do this again? We need to keep this going. And we said, Oh, yeah. Sure. DAVID: The second meeting focused on conditions closer to home. Pastor Moses and other Black ministers began to share their own encounters with prejudice. MOSES: There have been eye-opening experiences for many. To understand that there is a such thing as white privilege. DAVID: He gave the example of bank loans. MOSES: If . . . the husband is Black and the wife is white, let the wife go into bank and talk about the needs and get everything lined up. Get the yes. Ya’ll get the loan. Then come time to sign, the Black man come in and sign papers. And what have been made known that with some bankers, there’s a different scale been pulled out to go by when there’s Blacks applying for loans. . . . Folk don’t know a lot of stuff that’s going on. But it’s happening. DAVID: They also told the white ministers chilling stories of violence. Rev. Gates told the story of his grandfather being around at the time of Tom Brown’s lynching back in 1902—and how the memory still haunts his family. The horrific scene, he explained, is replayed in their minds every time they go to the courthouse. They avoid the front entrance because it’s so close to the Confederate statue. It was a story that profoundly moved Fr. Justin. JUSTIN: And he said it was such emotion, and I think he was tearing up. I was, I was horrified at that story. And I can’t imagine how anyone would feel knowing that their community had been targeted in such a way. I was sort of speechless after that. And it was clear that that memory was . . . safely guarded by their community—and known within the community. DAVID: Fr. Justin had grown up in the Deep South with a Confederate flag in his bedroom as a child. One reason he was speechless was that the story sounded so familiar—but this time it was coming from the other side of the color line. JUSTIN: We’re from Alabama originally. My great-grandparents who I remember as exceedingly racist—and were Sons of Confederate Veterans down the line. I remember a story about my great-great grandfather from the turn of the century, around the same time the statue was erected. . . . [5:56] My great-great grandfather was crossing the creek one day, and a Black man sort of cut in front of him. And as the story was related to my grandfather, my great-great grandfather joyfully murdered the Black man and bragged about it for the rest of his life. So when I heard that story, I’m like, Well, I’ve heard the other half of the story, maybe not right here. But this is something that, I mean, it hit me really strongly. How do you react to that? DAVID: The reaction Pastor Moses wanted had to do with the statue. But not all of the pastors thought that the two issues were related, that racism in the county was embodied by the Confederate statue. MOSES: When I first started talking about it, different ones talked about it being history. I said, Yeah, but is it the kind of history we want in the public’s eye? And so I gave them a piece of history. DAVID: A piece of his own history. A piece Pastor Moses had told me about in the last episode. MOSES: There’s my father. There’s my granddaddy we call papa. Then, what I did not know was papa’s daddy they called grandpap. Grandpap four generations back from me. Then grandpap’s daddy was the white master. And I asked the group, Do y’all think that his mother purposely laid down to be impregnated by the white master? DAVID: The ministers just sat there staring at the purple carpet under the pews. MOSES: Of course, you could hear a pin fall on the carpet in the church when I asked that question. Finally, somebody spoke up and said, Naw. I said, You’re right. So let us make a statue, put it in the courthouse yard, of a Black woman laying down being raped by the white master. How will y’all like that? They said, Oh no, that would be offensive. I said, Ok, that Confederate statue is very offensive. Just like the white community would be offended by that piece of history, which is history for real. I said, Look around this room among us African Americans. We’re different complexions. Have y’all given thought to why African American people are different complexions. That’s one of the reasons: the white master. I said, that’s history. So if you want to keep that up, let’s put another statue in the yard. DAVID: And then he issued a bracing challenge to the statue’s defenders. MOSES: Ok, ya’ll like it? Ya’ll want to keep it there? Don’t want to mess with it because white Jessamine County don’t want to get upset. Don’t want to make the money people uptight? . . . But on the other side of it, some stuff need to be stirred up. It should never have been erected, and it needs to come down. DAVID: The ministers absorbed the barrage—and asked for more. They kept coming to the meetings. 15, 20, sometimes 25 ministers at a time. And it wasn’t just the formal meetings. MOSES: I say, If y’all want to go to lunch, I don’t mind y’all buying mine. You know, I’ll go anytime. Of course, I said that part for a joke. But some of them actually took me up on it. They took me up on it. The next day I got an email from a minister of the county. When can we meet for lunch? I’m buying. . . . I got one, I don’t know how many, lunch engagements. I’ve been able to sit down and talk with brothers about issues. DAVID: These conversations changed many of the white pastors. Several confessed prejudice in their hearts; others confessed a lack of understanding. One shared that an ancestor had been a Confederate officer and that the Lord had been moving in his heart that the statue should be taken down. As the meetings progressed, others began to agree that it represented slavery, racism, and white supremacy. JUSTIN: I confess I’m slightly sympathetic to the idea of memorials in general of any sort. DAVID: After all, Fr. Justin is an Orthodox priest, and his church building is full of religious icons. JUSTIN: But learning about the statue’s context in the meeting certainly impacted me. . . . . And then all of a sudden in Pastor Radford’s church, I’m hearing African-American pastors speak about their community’s collective memory. It was a totally different feel, a totally different reality. And that’s what hit me first. And there were a number of stories that were told in that gathering that made me realize this was really deep, and I need to really listen. . . . I wasn’t aware of the pain. DAVID: So what do you think should be done with it now? JUSTIN: Well, I signed a petition that was put out by that young lady. I applaud her civic-mindedness. I signed the petition, and I commented that I would hope that the statue would be moved to a place like Maple Grove Cemetery. Now it was funny, when someone in the audience in that gathering said move it to Maple Grove, one of the Black pastors said, “Well, that’s just perfect, because we weren’t allowed to be buried there ever.” I didn’t know that story either. DAVID: The pastors were bonding over their shared discovery of hidden secrets . . . and over new convictions. Over the next months, this emerging coalition would become a force in Jessamine County politics. PART III: Backlash and resolve DAVID: The goal was to keep the pressure on. To show that the new coalition, led by young Jenna Sparks and Pastor Moses, could make a difference. Momentum indeed continued . . . but in an unlikely place. One of the biggest Black Lives Matter protests in all of Kentucky happened six miles west of the Confederate statue . . . in the tiny, quiet town of Wilmore. ELLEN: I am Ellen Martin. I have lived in Wilmore, Kentucky, for just shy of 19 years now. Moved here to attend Asbury Seminary and never left. DAVID: Tell me what happened on Saturday. ELLEN: Saturday, a silent march because black lives matter happened in Wilmore, Kentucky. DAVID: We’ll get to the “silent” part shortly. . . . and the “because” part. But for the time being, Pastor Moses appreciated the concern of Ellen and the other white women who organized the march. MOSES: Because they see a need for change. They see a need. They have watched their Black sisters especially be mistreated. . . . And they hear the conversation from white people about Black people, and they don’t agree with it. So it’s time to take a stand. ELLEN: We knew at least fifty people would show. I hoped for about 100. The guesses consistently are that it was closer to 300. DAVID: Before it began, I got several marchers to read their signs to me. LAURA: I’m Laura Hunter. “We are 400 years late. It’s time to unlearn hate.” MÉDINE: I’m Médine Keener. “Stop murdering black men, women, and kids.” SKIP: My name is Skip Elliott. My sign says, “Red, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in his sight.” JON: I’m Jon. “Black lives matter.” DAVID: I knew Medine, Skip, and Jon. But I also met a few people for the very first time. The most poignant conversation was with a 78-year-old Black man named George. DAVID: Have you seen anything like this before? GEORGE: No, I have never. DAVID: Not even in the civil rights movement? GEORGE: No, uh-uh. But it were rough! DAVID: How was it rough? GEORGE: Because if I were walking on the sidewalk and you . . . was coming this way, I had to step aside, and let you go there. DAVID: George here is talking about racial etiquette. In segregation times, Black people had to step off the sidewalk in deference to whites. George cheered the end of that era and the beginning of a new one in which rallies for racial justice could happen in Jessamine County. GEORGE: Thanks be to God that he brought us a mighty, mighty long way. But I trust in God. God can do all things. DAVID: George hadn’t yet heard about the petition to remove the Confederate statue. But he approved. GEORGE: The way we have raised up this generation, they want it down. They want to do more. We want to advance more. And the more you leave it up, the worse it’s gonna get. . . . Yeah, it’s gonna get worse. DAVID: His prediction was jarring against the backdrop of the optimism all around us. He expected things to get worse. As I listened to the haunting sound of 600 feet on pavement, I contemplated what he meant. But it was hard to be pessimistic in this moment. It was a glorious start to the march. So many people. So many excited people. It was absolutely unprecedented in this town. As George himself said, racial conditions had improved so much in his lifetime. When the marchers reached the town green, a young Black woman approached the stage and broke the silence. CASONDRA: Because I don’t want my child to have to march. I don’t want my child to have to defend her life. I don’t want my child to have to wake up and to say, why did you make me black, God? Why? Why do my people have to suffer? What did we ever do? Because those are the questions that I have every single morning now. DAVID: Every single face on that stage was black. The white political and religious leaders who run Wilmore didn’t get on the stage at all. For the entire hour-long program. They were letting Black folks speak for themselves. CASONDRA: We make up about 10 percent of the population in Nicholasville alone. We can’t do it. So we need you to take our hands to walk with us. And we need some other people to be on the other side of that invisible line to take it and destroy that line and bring it down. Because we all have to move forward. And we can’t do it unless we all come together and make it happen. And so when I say for you to take it down, that means use your privilege. Use your words—and speak up for us in places where we can’t speak for ourselves. Because we’ve been silent for so long. My mother has been silent. My grandfather has been silent for so long. And I’m sick of being silent. I’m going to speak up and I’m going to say, “We Shall Overcome.” MAN IN CROWD: Yes, we will. DAVID: The rest of the program pulled no punches. Speakers called out police brutality, mass incarceration, and feel-good narratives of history. Here’s Pastor Marlend Fain of Cedar Top Baptist Church. MARLEND: It has been easy for us to escape the truth of police brutality by yelling phrases like what about Black-on-Black crime or shouldn’t all lives matter? Let me help you out. None of these catchphrases or approaches should be an avenue for us to escape the truth. DAVID: It went on for some time—in sermons, in poetry, in prayers, in old-fashioned testimony. All the way to the end when Pastor Fain closed with a four-minute sermon masquerading as a prayer. MARLEND: We thank you, Father God, for how you will use this historical moment. Right here in Wilmore, Kentucky. To move your people. . . . So now Father God, we pray that as we leave this place, but not your presence, we be serious about the words have been spoken here. We pray that now Father God, that you continue to stir our hearts. We pray, Father God, that this can be a city where racism cannot live. DAVID: Pastor Fain finished with a benediction: MARLEND: Bless us again in all that we do. It’s in your darling son Jesus’ name we ask all this. Amen. Amen. And amen. DAVID: As I stood on the green, I thought about redemption. People and groups change. Many white Christians in Jessamine County were once enslavers. Some were lynchers. Most were segregationists. And then they weren’t. And now some were stepping aside to let Black voices ring through the village green. It was a hopeful moment. Not long after the march, however, I began to understand what George meant—about things potentially getting worse. It turns out, there was significant pushback about the march. ELLEN: I think, honestly, for a lot of people that who asked, it was about the integrity of what they were affiliating themselves to. DAVID: Here’s Ellen, one of the march organizers, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement. Many in town worried about what they perceived as its loud and violent activism. And in the initial advertisements, the march was called a Black Lives Matter event. ELLEN: In retrospect, I wish that we had written that I had had the forethought to say silent march, because “black lives matter.” And black lives matter being all lower cases. It would have overcome the obstacles that I was given that the organization and movement Black Lives Matter is rooted in critical theory. It’s not biblical, it has ungodly values. DAVID: I don’t want names. But I’m trying to understand the demographic makeup of the folks who are suspicious of it. ELLEN: Mostly white males. And congregations. Actually, they weren’t even congregations. They were people within congregations that love serving others, that have done beautiful things in this community. DAVID: These critics were the nice critics. A fiercer backlash came from the county’s margins. BETH: Being friends with a couple of the people who organized it, and hearing the threats that they received about having and sponsoring a Black Lives Matter walk and conversation was just eye opening that, you know, there are still active Klan members in the community. DAVID: This is Rev. Beth Garrod-Logsdon. BETH: I pastor a Caucasian congregation in a Caucasian town of Wilmore. DAVID: She leads Wilmore Presbyterian Church and is one of the few women involved in the ministers’ group convened by Pastor Moses. I asked her to be more specific about the threats the organizers had gotten. BETH: Threats to their life and to their children and families—and to the point that they have had to go off social media. DAVID: It wasn’t just the Wilmore march organizers. I was hearing that other people in Jessamine County were feeling the heat too. MOSES: Reading people’s comments on Facebook is rough. . . . It make you upset . . . If their expression on Facebook is how they really feel, apparently they still full of hatred and prejudice. DAVID: Thinking back over the previous months, I recalled not only the harassment online but also the big trucks revving their engines to drown out protesters by the statue. All this in addition to the quieter forms of resistance. Some of Jenna’s friends might not show up with a gun, but they also wouldn’t sign her petition. JENNA: I don’t understand how you can have people who you’re so close to, and love and not fight for them. It really confuses me. . . . It confuses me how people can not care. DAVID: And then there was the minister’s group. Its perceived unanimity was a bit misleading. It didn’t take into account the hostile and indifferent white ministers who never showed up in the first place. The twenty-five who did comprise maybe a third of all white ministers in Jessamine County. And there were those who came—and then stopped coming. MOSES: And, of course, there are reasons they gave me for not coming. Was basically because Sunday afternoon, we got our families, we got our churches, and we can’t do it. I said, okay, let’s do it another day of the week. . . . But this is my family time. . . . So I took a lot of them off my list. Because they never showed up no more. . . . Some of the guys came one time. That’s it. And we weren’t going the route they wanted to go. So. DAVID: But in the days and weeks that followed, a fledgling coalition kept putting one foot after the other. Professor Dupont decided to run for Kentucky’s state legislature. Rev. Beth got sick of seeing the Confederate monument featured as the top landmark on online maps and organized a successful email campaign to change those maps. BETH: Yeah, that was my act of defiance. That’s right, I can get something changed on a Google map. DAVID: And young Jenna Sparks kept on plugging away at her statue petition. As the summer rolled on, her infectious enthusiasm kept bringing in more signatures. Pastor Moses helped. He not only kept circulating the petition online, he also deputized the women of First Baptist Church, to print out paper copies. In just a couple of weeks, they collected 152 more signatures around Herveytown. Pastor Moses also kept convening the ministerial group. Six months before, colleague Marlend Fain told me, most of Jessamine’s ministers would have acknowledged that pockets of hate existed. But they would have denied that there are, to use his words, “systemic issues along the race line.” That seems to be changing. MARLEND: I’m 43, so I don’t go back to the sixties. But probably for the first time in my life, I see us really trying to address some issues when it comes to race. DAVID: Those issues included wealth inequality and education inequality—and the Confederate statue on Main Street. In fact, the Confederate monument became one of the dominant threads in the ministers’ meetings. MOSES: There was a lot of questions asked in the meeting about it. Why y’all want it moved? Do y’all want it moved? Will y’all be okay with just putting a plaque up saying honoring all the soldiers that have fought in the war from Jessamine County. And the reply has been . . . No, we will not be satisfied. That’s like putting a BandAid on a sore. Let's remove it, take it to the cemetery. DAVID: Another proposed solution was to reverse the statue’s identity back to a Union soldier. Pastor Moses didn’t like that either. MOSES: It’d be like the whites are trying to sell us a no good deal again. . . . And I’m afraid, especially to the Blacks that grew up in Jessamine County, been there all their lives, they still gonna see the Confederate soldier. DAVID: Local white pastor Max Vanderpool began to push hard . . . including on Judge David West. He wrote the judge an impassioned letter. MAX: And I played my lifelong Republican evangelical pastor card, and I’m like, we’re supposed to be the party of Lincoln, like, this is not cool. This is not acceptable, like this monument has got to go. Like if you can’t do this now, I don’t think you, like you shouldn’t be in office. Like this is one of those moments. I remember I shared my letter with Moses, and he goes, dang. . . . He goes, Well, I’m curious as to what was in that. Well, I’ll send you a copy. Wow! And I was like, Yeah, you can’t say that. But I can. DAVID: Max is saying that Black people can be written off as angry and unreasonable. White allies can say intense things and still be taken seriously. And so taking their cue from Jenna, the ministers drafted their own petition requesting that the statue be removed. The only difference was that they wanted it moved to Maple Grove Cemetery. Not destroyed. MOSES: Because by putting it in the cemetery, to me it’d be symbolic to it’s dead, it’s dead. That battle was fought, and the Confederates lost. It ought to be a dead situation. Put it in a cemetery. DAVID: Pastor Moses didn’t get everything he wanted. MAX: We have a couple of pastors that are very outspoken in their politics, and we made changes to the letter to accommodate them so that they could feel like they could sign it. DAVID: The changes toned down the intensity of the letter. Pastor Beth didn’t particularly like that, but she understood the pressure. She and every other pastor thinking of signing the petition had to deal with dissent within their congregations. BETH: But you know, as pastors, we’re somewhat like politicians too. And I know that not everyone here at this church agrees with my viewpoints. . . . And I’ve already talked to my elders here and said, Look, this is something I believe in. We all have to choose our ditches to die in. And this might be mine. I hope not. DAVID: In the end, though, the ministers decided to flex their moral authority. By October, more than twenty had signed the petition. The old-timers told me they had never seen anything like it. MAX: I can’t think of anything in this county that’s gotten that many pastors to sign on to something as in terms of a petition before a government, local government body for something. DAVID: Pastor Moses agreed. MOSES: Never, never, never. . . . We hope that Jessamine County can set the tone for other counties to do the same. DAVID: It was an exciting time. As they submitted their petition to County Judge-Executive David West, public momentum seemed to be moving their direction. On the courthouse lawn, the judge’s sign still stood—the one that read, “Jessamine County is addressing options so this statue will reflect our values of today, which is justice in unity.” Local newspapers breathlessly reported the unfolding drama of the statue, especially about how vulnerable it was. Take, for example, an editorial in the Jessamine Journal written by a descendent of a Confederate captain. Entitled “It’s Time for Jessamine County to Join the Union,” the article argued that the “cause so grand” was to commit treason and tear the country apart “in bloody strife” to preserve slavery. The Lexington Herald-Leader also weighed in, saying that it represented “obvious racism” and that the county’s decision would determine its perception as “a delightful, bustling small town or a racially hostile backwater.” Pastor Moses sees the most hope in younger generations. MOSES: The young white community is saying I’m tired of y’all treating my brothers and sisters this way. And that’s what some of the older white people can’t stand: that the young white folks are saying we ain’t putting up with it. DAVID: Many of them rallied around Jenna’s petition. After signing it, one woman wrote, “Robert E. Lee is a relative of mine. And I’m proud to be from the south. But you’re my sister and worth so much more than any statue.” Jenna was thrilled by the support. JENNA: I can’t remember the exact number of signatures, but I think we got, I want to say 500, and something close to 600. It might have been more than that, but I’d rather shoot lower than higher. DAVID: In the fall of 2020, Jenna delivered her petition to Judge West, whose job it was to figure out what to do next. Jenna and her father walked the two blocks from her house. As the Confederate statue loomed to their right, they entered the courthouse. JENNA: And then there was like a door. . . . The lady was sitting there, like his secretary, and his door was closed. And she was talking on the phone . . . . She said that he was on a call while she was talking on the phone to whoever else it was. When she got off the phone, we gave her the petition. . . . I think we put it in a folder. And it had like, our letter to him paperclipped to the front of the folder. . . . I think she stamped something, and then said she’d give it to him. And my email and my phone number and all my contact information was on there. And she asked if we needed a receipt. But since we had everything online, and we had photocopied the paper petition, we were like, No, that’s all right. We have everything we need. And then me and my dad left. It took like all of five minutes. DAVID: The submission of Jenna’s petition may have felt anticlimactic. But as Pastor Moses acknowledged, it put Judge West in a very difficult position. MOSES: Yep. He’s in a hot spot for real. . . . People aren’t going to be satisfied either way. If you keep it up, we ain’t gonna be satisfied. If you take it down, some other folks won’t be satisfied. Destroying our history. DAVID: It feels like a reprise of the civil rights movement. High emotions on all sides as activists push hard for social change in the face of a powerful white establishment. A judge and six county magistrates, still all men and still all white, are the deciders. Jenna, Pastor Moses, and so many others now wait to see how they will respond. OUTRO: Thanks for listening to “Rebel on Main.” Special thanks to audio producer Barry Blair, story editor Stephen Smith, and Asbury University and the Louisville Institute for their generous support. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast—and leave a rating and a review so others can find us. For pictures of Jenna, Pastor Moses, and the Wilmore march, head to rebelonmain.com. I’m David Swartz. See you next time.