89.3 WFPL News Louisville · Confederate Monument Removed From Kentucky’s Capitol
A statue of Jefferson Davis is on its way out of the Kentucky State Capitol Building.
Crews removed it over the course of two days after the state’s Historic Properties Advisory Commission voted 11 to 1 to relocate it to Jefferson Davis Historic Park, in Fairview.
Cathy Thomas, who is the only Black member, said she voted for it to go because a monument to the former president of the Confederacy doesn’t belong at the Capitol.
“He is a symbol of the Confederacy that might still have me in chains. And that is why removing divisive symbols such as this, especially from publicly funded spaces that I pay into, it's necessary and long overdue.”
The one dissenting vote, Brandon Wilson, said he joined this board to, “protect history, not remove it.”
A crew of more than a dozen, all in fluorescent yellow shirts, worked for hours to remove the Davis statue from where it has stood since 1936. While they worked, they recovered artifacts from the statue’s hollow plinth, including a newspaper dated Oct. 20, 1936 and an old empty bottle of Kentucky bourbon whiskey with a note inside.
