Today, the airport. Tomorrow, the Rotunda.

Now, commission a statue of Ali to stand in the Capitol in Frankfort in place of the Traitor in Defense of Tyranny now despoiling the Rotunda.

From the Courier:

Muhammad Ali once said his "greatness came and started in Louisville."

Now his name will be among the first things visitors and travelers see when they fly into his beloved hometown. 

City officials announced Wednesday that Louisville International Airport will be renamed after the boxer and humanitarian often called "the Greatest."

The new name: Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.

"Muhammad Ali belonged to the world, but he only had one hometown, and fortunately, that is our great city of Louisville," Mayor Greg Fischer said.

"Muhammad became one of the most well-known people to ever walk the Earth and has left a legacy of humanitarianism and athleticism that has inspired billions of people.

"It is important that we, as a city, further champion The Champ's legacy," Fischer continued. "And the airport renaming is a wonderful next step."

Just Dynamite the Thing

It's an incitement of right-wing violence.

Get that thing out of the capitol and out of the damn state.  Replace it with one of Muhammad Ali, who accomplished more and was more of a hero than Davis ever did or was.

From the Herald:

A white nationalist group claimed credit for hanging a "patriot, hero, statesman" sign to replace a plaque removed from the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky Capitol Rotunda.

People associated with Identity Evropa placed the placard on the statue Monday, the group said on Twitter Tuesday night. But the timing of the act was disputed by state officials.

State officials said they quickly removed the placard and are reviewing security measures.

A picture shared by the organization shows that its sign matched the original plaque's inscription of "Patriot - Hero - Statesman." The original plaque was removed March 11. The group's sign also said, "Our history will not be erased."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article209764479.html#storylink=cpy

The original plaque was taken down after the Historic Properties Advisory Commission, which oversees state-owned statues, voted unanimously in October to have it taken down.

The group claiming credit has been monitored.

"Identity Evropa is at the forefront of the racist 'alt-right's' effort to recruit white, college-aged men and transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Rather than denigrating people of color, the campus-based organization focuses on raising white racial consciousness, building community based on shared racial identity and intellectualizing white supremacist ideology."

OK, But Not Nearly Good Enough

Unless they replace the plaque with one identifying Davis as a Traitor in Defense of Slavery, an Embarrassment to the Commonwealth and a Permanent Symbol of Racism, Slavery and Treason, the next step must be removing the motherfucker and installing Mohammad Ali in that place.

From the Herald:

A plaque proclaiming Jefferson Davis as a hero and a patriot will be removed from Kentucky's Capitol, the latest effort to alter Confederate monuments across the country following outbreaks of racially motivated violence.

The Historic Properties Advisory Commission voted to remove the plaque, which is attached to a 15-foot-tall (5-meter-tall) marble statue of Davis in the rotunda of the state Capitol. The plaque declares Davis is a "patriot, hero, statesman" and lists his accomplishments in both the United States and Confederate governments. Last month, a committee recommended the state remove the plaque because of its "subjective" language.

"There are people who don't think he was heroic. And so we just decided to remove it to eliminate that subjective word," commission chairman Steve Collins said.

Leslie Nigels, director of the Division of Historic Properties, said the plaque would be removed in a few days.

 The decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

First: There's a fucking Kentucky division of the shameful females defending treason in defense of slavery? They're not just treasonous, they're stupid.  Kentucky never joined the confederacy.

Second: When you donate something, it belongs to the organization to which you donated it.  If you don't like what they do with your gift, tough shit.

Third:  Let's think of a way to not just remove Davis, but to destroy that statue in a publicly humiliating way that will put the traitors in defense of slavery in their place forever.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpyThe decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpyThe decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpy

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

Read this piece on Wednesday's rally to demand Gov. "I Don't Know What History Means" Bevin remove the statue of Traitor in Defense of Slavery Jefferson Davis from the Capitol Rotunda.

If you had been there, you might have noticed something unusual about the Rotunda statues, meant to honor the great men of the Commonwealth.

Here is bigger-than-life Abraham Lincoln, in the exact center of the Rotunda.

His left boot toe is shiny because 7 million schoolkids a year visit the Rotunda and just have to rub it.

Yes, of course I did.

There's a sign asking people not to do that. It doesn't work.








Here is Senator Henry Clay:

Here is Senator and Vice-President Alben Barkley:

Here is Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the first successful abdominal surgery in 1809.

 

All of them are cast in bronze, all of them dark brown from time and lack of rubbing.

Then there's this one, in the fourth corner. 

That blinding white motherfucker went up in 1936, 71 years after the Traitor in Defense of Slavery - who might have been born in Kentucky but who grew up and lived the rest of his life in Mississippi - surrendered.

He doesn't belong in the People's House, for more than aesthetic reasons.

But you don't want to hang from a rope until he's gone.






Who do I want in his place?  This guy:

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.