Rebel on Main

In June 2020 a Black Lives Matter protest erupts in Jessamine County, Kentucky. It soon transforms into a campaign to destroy the Confederate statue that looms behind them on Main Street.

As historian and local resident David Swartz covers this effort, he also investigates the history of this beautiful corner of the Bluegrass. He finds lots of hidden stories, including a disastrous expulsion of formerly enslaved refugees from a Uni...

On a warm Monday morning, a week after protests broke out in front of the courthouse, a man with short-cropped hair stands beside the statue. Legs astride with an enormous handgun in a holster on his left side, Brandon is guarding “history.” When I approach him, he explains that the statue is not a monument to slavery. Referencing the inscription on the statue’s foundation, he says that it honors “soldiers who have fought and died ...

Built with slave labor, Jessamine County, Kentucky, has a history that includes over a dozen lynchings, Jim Crow codes, and continuing racial inequities—all overseen by a Confederate statue on the courthouse lawn.

Like Confederate defender Brandon, Rev. Robert Gates cares very much about history. But the Confederate statue doesn’t speak for him. From his pulpit at the Historic Camp Nelson Baptist Church, he tells uncomfortable stor...

Two weeks into the Black Lives Matter campaign, homeschooler Jenna Sparks gets mad. This sixteen-year-old descendant of a Confederate ancestor, whose name was Jeptha Jefferson Davis Sparks, has a Black cousin, and seeing so many people in Jessamine who fly the Confederate battle flag angers her. So does walking by the Confederate statue, located just two blocks from her house.

So Jenna writes a petition to “remove and destroy” the ...

Archaeologist Stephen McBride wants to emancipate Jessamine from the Lost Cause. He zeroes in on Camp Nelson, which has nearly disappeared from the county’s memory. Farmers have leveled the earthworks, and developers are eyeing the site. Camp Nelson’s significance has also been buried by racial hostility. Many in the local Black community have been driven off by lynchings, KKK rallies, and backlash to the civil rights movement.

As ...

Bob doesn’t care at all about the statue—until he does. A Canadian transplant to Jessamine, his ancestry traces back to abolitionist New England. But as the 2020 election approaches, Bob sees a political opening. For months prior to the election, he spends three hours a night working through a list of 13,500 Democrats conducting a telephone survey.

The work is arduous and often dispiriting. It takes fifteen phone dials to get one p...

Jenna’s petition stalls. Blue Lives Matter outpaces Black Lives Matter. But in 2023 a new surge of activism reignites the controversy. What will happen to Jessamine County’s Confederate statue? And what does the statue’s fate reveal about the soul of the divided southern community?

Resources

• For pictures of the courthouse square, First Baptist Church, and Jessamine County during the Spanish-American War, head to https://www.re...