By Al Cross

(Reprinted from the Sunday, June 28

edition of the Courier-Journal)

FRANKFORT – Sometimes in the rotunda of the state Capitol, I’ve had time to contemplate the stony presence of Jefferson Davis, and to think that he doesn’t belong there. But the prospect of removing his marble statue has always seemed a distant prospect.

How quickly things can change.

The massacre of nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., by a young white man who waved the Confederate battle flag and burned the American flag, has forced a tipping point in this country about symbols of the Confederacy.

Kentucky was a slave state, but we didn’t secede, so official honor to the Confederate flag isn’t an issue here like it is in states to our south. But the Jeff Davis statue is – one that has been simmering mostly under the radar for 50 years, but that exploded last week.

In stunning succession, removal of the statue to the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort was endorsed by a series of Republican honchos: House Minority Leader Jeff Hoover, Senate President Robert Stivers, gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Democrats were slow to react, and because of Bevin’s stand, the focus was on Attorney General Jack Conway, the Democratic nominee for governor. After saying Tuesday that he needed to talk with African American leaders about the issue, on Wednesday he endorsed removal of the statue.

Conway worked in the governor’s office for six years, ran for Congress from Louisville and is in his eighth year as attorney general, so it’s hard to believe that he didn’t know how African Americans felt about the Jeff Davis statue. If he didn’t, he gets demerits for failing to pay attention.

My guess is that he WAS paying attention – to the substantial number of older, white Kentuckians who are still inclined to vote Democratic in statewide, non-federal elections and who see no harm in Confederate symbols. Trust me, there are still a lot of them out there.

It’s the kind of thing that might keep such folks from voting this fall; social media last week displayed many vocal defenders of the flag and the statue in Kentucky, and a self-selecting poll by WBKO-TV in Bowling Green registered 90 percent disapproval for evicting Davis from the Capitol. Opinion about moving Confederate flags from places of honor has been similar.

So, what is it that enamors Kentuckians to Jefferson Davis, who spent at best eight of his 82 years in Kentucky and became a traitor to his country to defend the horrific institution of slavery? It has a lot to do with the history he helped make, and the mythmaking that followed.

Kentucky had a star in Confederate flags, but never had a functioning rebel government, and at least twice as many Kentuckians fought for the Union as for the South. But slavery was firmly embedded in our culture, and after the Emancipation Proclamation and the induction of former slaves into the Army, sentiment turned against the Union. Federal troops occupied the state, preventing any rebellion, but their rough treatment of Kentuckians made the Southern sentiment even firmer.

After the war, Gov. Thomas Bramlette pardoned rebels, allowing them to take over the Democratic Party and begin a whitewash of slavery and the Confederacy that was formed to preserve it. For three decades, service in the Confederate Army was more or less a requirement for statewide office. Republicans, trying to build a party, didn’t want to re-litigate the war and its issues.

As Reconstruction faded in the former Confederacy, Jim Crow laws took hold and were endorsed by the Supreme Court (with a notable dissent by Kentuckian John Marshall Harlan), Kentucky followed suit. It required schools to be segregated, and in 1904 extended that to Berea College, a beacon of racial equality, harmony and reconciliation.

Lynchings were common, and mob violence chased most African Americans from some cities and counties. That continued the legacy of rape, murder and torture that were slavery’s tools of subjugation. But literature and other elements of popular culture represented the antebellum era as one of genteel owners taking good care of their slaves. And memorials to Confederate dead became more common than those for Union soldiers.

The story of memorials and Kentucky’s embrace of all things Southern is best told by historian Anne Marshall in her 2010 book, Creating a Confederate Kentucky. Writing about the dedication of the Jefferson Davis Monument at Fairview in 1924, she wrote:

“Kentucky appeared Confederate because Davis’s monument and other Confederate memorials in the state represented the sort of history that spoke to grand possibilities lost in the name of defending a beautiful world of the past. This past was more compelling than white Kentuckians’ complicated historical choices – replete with too many disclaimers, contingencies and ambiguities to be inspirational.”

So, we believe what we want to believe, and the hard truths about slavery were rarely told as generations of Kentuckians grew up. Perhaps the best example of that is our state song.

In 1928, the commonwealth adopted “My Old Kentucky Home” as its anthem, and promoted as truth unconfirmed accounts that Stephen Foster wrote it about (or even in) the Bardstown home of his uncle, John Rowan. The inspiration was more likely the anti-slavery, fact-based novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the song’s original title was “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night.” The first stanza, the one we all sing, gives little clue (especially since “darkies are gay” was changed to “people are gay” a few decades ago) that it is a slave’s lament about being sold down the river, and most Kentuckians probably don’t know that.

When the Davis statue was conceived, sculpted and placed in the Capitol in the early to mid-1930s, the country was observing the Civil War’s 75th anniversary and the last of the war’s veterans were dying. Anyone wanting to rehash the horrors of slavery and its chief advocate was surely shouted down.

So, today’s debate about the statue is really part of a dialogue long postponed – a broader dialogue about race in Kentucky, which has such a small black population that hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians don’t really know a black person. Ignorance breeds fear, and sometimes hate. At a state, we have yet to grow up when it comes to race.

Jefferson Davis’s Kentucky Connections

Born at Fairview, 1808; family moved to Mississippi, 1810

Attended Catholic school at Springfield, 1816-1818

Attended Transylvania University, Lexington, 1821-24

Married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor, Louisville, 1835 (She died three months later)

Visited his birthplace area of Todd and Christian counties, 1875 and 1886

(Sources: Kentucky Encyclopedia and Jefferson Davis Papers, Transylvania University)