By Johnny Masters
On Third Street and Brandeis Avenue, U of L has a monument erected of a white Confederate soldier in black-face paint.
The Confederate statue is ironically sitting in front of a cafeteria on campus that has a mostly black staff serving a mostly white student body. The status quo has not changed. It’s no wonder black people only make up 7.9 percent of Kentucky’s population, compared to 12.9 percent nationally. I wouldn’t want to live with us either. This makes me wonder: Did the south really lose?
Because of Kentucky’s central location during the Civil War, most runaway slaves ran through Kentucky to get to the north, and most of those went through Louisville. Louisville is also home to Muhammad Ali. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was thought up in Kentucky.
To be fair and balanced, to honor equality, we need to erect a monument dedicated to the folks whose backs were used to build the greatest superpower on the planet, for no pay and for no reparations. Having a statue commemorating the underground railroad, to show the black perspective of the deep south during the Civil War, or a statue of Gerald Neal, Blaine Hudson or Bruce Tyler, would be fair. Honestly, any work of art that would counterbalance the institutionalized racism in Kentucky would be fair. Or we could just take the black-faced Confederate statue down.
– Johnny Masters is a senior political science major.
