The Western Kentucky city of Murray seems an unlikely place for racial
reckoning.
SPLC-sponsored film documents battle over Confederate statue in
Kentucky town
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Esther Schrader Read the full piece here
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Friend,
The Western Kentucky city of Murray seems an unlikely place for racial
reckoning. It is home to only about 19,000 people - a population
that is overwhelmingly white - and a university. In 2012, it
successfully campaigned to earn the moniker "friendliest small
town in America" from a national tourism marketing association.
It sits in a state that, while divided during the Civil War, never
seceded from the Union.
But it turns out that the small town, whose website depicts a
sun-dappled country road winding through peaceful fields, is no
different than much of the rest of the United States. Disturb things
just a little and its veneer reveals an interior of discrimination,
racial tension and resentment.
That's what happened in Murray in the summer of 2020, when some
residents began peacefully demonstrating at the site of a statue of
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee - and counterprotesters led by
local white business leaders confronted them, some with epithets and
pepper spray. As Confederate monuments
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in larger cities across the country began coming down in that season
of racial reckoning, what happened when the movement for justice and
equity came to Murray became emblematic of the piercing divisions over
what communities choose to remember, and what they choose to forget.
A new documentary, "Ghosts of a Lost Cause
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," will screen at the Wrather Museum of Murray State University
on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 15. Produced with support from the
Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange through the Rural Urban Solidarity
Project, with this and future screenings sponsored by the Southern
Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project
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, it recounts the thus-far-unsuccessful protests to remove the
16-foot-tall monument, as well as what led to the protests and their
impact in the years since.
Read More
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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