Take Jeff Davis Statue Out of the KY Capitol Rotunda Now

Motherfucker might have been born in Kentucky, but he made his home in Mississippi.  Contrary to the hallucinations of the Commonwealth's many Defenders of Treason in Defense of Slavery, Kentucky never seceeded from the Union, never committed Treason in Defense of Slavery, never joined the Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis has no business looming over people in the Capitol Rotunda as if he were a hero.  He's a traitor, and a motherfucking piece of shit.  Get his statue the fuck out of there and replace it with one of a genuine Kentucky hero:  Muhammad Ali.

Erik Loomis on the removal of a statue of Jefferson Davis in New Orleans last week:

This is genuinely a wonderful thing. Again, these aren’t “monuments to history.” They are expressions of Jim Crow power, placed on the population of New Orleans at a moment where black voting and social rights had been repressed by force. They served, in the minds of the people who erected them, as social lessons to the black population, reminding them who was still in charge. There is no good reason to keep these statues up.

 UPDATE: New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's op-ed:

But New Orleans was also America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of misery and torture. Our history is forever intertwined with that of our great nation — including its most terrible sins. We must always remember our history and learn from it. But that doesn’t mean we must valorize the ugliest chapters, as we do when we put the Confederacy on a pedestal — literally — in our most prominent public places.

The record is clear: New Orleans’s Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were erected with the goal of rewriting history to glorify the Confederacy and perpetuate the idea of white supremacy. These monuments stand not as mournful markers of our legacy of slavery and segregation, but in reverence of it. They are an inaccurate recitation of our past, an affront to our present and a poor prescription for our future.

The right course, then, is to excise these symbols of injustice. The Battle of Liberty Place monument was not built to commemorate the fallen law enforcement officers of the racially integrated New Orleans police and state militia. It was meant to honor members of the Crescent City White League, the people who killed them. That kind of “honor” has no place in an American city. So, last month, we took the monument down.

This week, we began the removal of a statue honoring Davis, and soon thereafter Lee and Beauregard. It won’t erase history. But we can begin a new chapter of New Orleans’s history by placing these monuments, and the legacy of oppression they represent, in museums and other spaces where they can be viewed in an appropriate educational setting as examples of our capacity to change.

After we’re done moving these monuments, we’ll face an even greater task: coming together to decide who we are as a city — and as a nation. Over the past few years, before the monument removal effort, we began Welcome Table New Orleans, which facilitates tough conversations about race and brings various communities together on projects in their neighborhoods. As part of our work, residents have discussed and designed reconciliation projects, such as a mural and oral history project on what was once part of a plantation, as monuments to the future, not the past.

Lexington Kentucky was the biggest slave market north of New Orleans. Long past time the snooty denizens of that city (in which I was raised, so I know of what I write) get their snowy white asses down off their thoroughbred high horses and demand the removal of Jeff Davis.