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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 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,” 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, 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.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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