The statue of a Confederate soldier that’s been on the lawn of the Daviess County Courthouse since 1900 was removed on May 31, 2022.
Owensboro NAACP President Rhondalyn Randolph said the monument honored the Confederacy that enslaved her ancestors, organized to overthrow the government and lost the war.
Randolph says that’s not worthy of honor.
“Germany, they don’t honor the Nazis and it’s kind of like the same correlation," said Randolph. "But it’s something that we should never forget, because if you do not know your history you are doomed to repeat it.”
Randolph thinks if the statue can be a way to honor the dead, it would be
appropriate to place it in a cemetery.
Daviess County Attorney Claud Porter said the statue is at the county operations center.
“We’re now cleaning it and getting it prepared," said Porter. "There’s no firm decision about placement yet.”
Porter says the plan is to remove the base of the statue from the courthouse lawn, but that has not been done yet because of the difficulty of removing a pedestal that weighs about 16 tons and has been in the ground for more than 100 years.
The removal is similar to decisions made across the nation as the result of the controversy ignited by the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia when 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and 19 people injured.
After that rally, citizens who found the Daviess County statue objectionable complained to the Fiscal Court.
Other racially-charged violence and deaths, including the 2020 murders of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis policeman and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville apartment by police officers with a no-knock warrant, inflamed the controversy over Confederate monuments across the nation.
On Aug. 6 2020 after the complaints from local citizens, led by the
Owensboro NAACP, Daviess County Fiscal Court unanimously voted to remove the monument.
The statue is currently in the Daviess County Operations Center. There’s no decision yet on where it might be placed.
