A Kentucky history professor has launched a new podcast exploring how issues of race, religion and community are symbolized by a Confederate memorial in a rural town near Lexington.
“Rebel on Main” also presents a historical and sociological inquiry into issues like the Lost Cause, slavery, whiteness and modern-day social unrest as expressed through and around the statue of a Confederate soldier outside the Jessamine County Courthouse, said podcast writer and host David Swartz, a county resident and professor of history at nearby Asbury University.
The idea for the series developed from writing a book that was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the social unrest sparked by the 2020 police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Those murders also contributed to Black Lives Matter demonstrations and widespread protests against Confederate monuments mostly across the South.
David R. Swartz
“In Kentucky, Floyd’s death revived the memory of Breonna Taylor,” who was killed in Louisville in March 2020, Swartz said. Protests spread to Nicholasville, the county seat of Jessamine County, where attention quickly settled on the statue as a symbol of racial injustice.
“I bought a professional grade recorder and struck gold wandering through the crowds capturing the audio I use in the podcast,” Swartz said. “I also captured audio of big pickup trucks circling, revving engines counter-protest.”
Swartz received underwriting for the podcast from the Louisville Institute. Funded by the Lilly Endowment, the institute provides grants, fellowships and other awards for projects that contribute to the understanding of American faith groups and religious practices.
As the events of 2020 unfolded, Swartz said he often was struck by surprise that protests were occurring in a small Southern city of about 30,000 mostly white residents.
“Jessamine County is not New Orleans or Richmond or Charlottesville or any other liberal Southern university town where statues have come down in waves over the last decade, Swartz explains in the first episode. “This place is conservative. It’s fairly rural.”
The Jessamine County statue
The statue became the focal point because it was the only Civil War-related monument displayed at the courthouse. There is a cemetery with Civil War dead a few blocks away, but those interred there were from other Southern states yet died in Kentucky.
Another irony is the Confederate memorial is located in a border state that was pro-slavery but aligned with the Union during the war. That contradiction is captured in the statue itself, which was initially commissioned to honor a Union soldier before being purchased and refashioned into a Southern trooper by Jessamine County.
Dedicated in 1896, the statue does not depict an actual county resident who fought or died in the war, Swartz added. It’s much more generic than that.
“It has a CSA (Confederate States of America) belt buckle and a Union cap. That’s just perfect for a state that never left the Union but was still a slave state.”
Residents opposed to removing the memorial argued doing so would erase an important if painful chapter in county and U.S. history, Swartz said, while others argue the statue is a tribute to the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, slavery and the Jim Crow and racial segregation era that followed.
“Right now on the lawn, the Confederate statue tells only one story; it is the only representative of the war there and it says nothing about slavery or lynchings. That’s problematic in a county that had over a 40% Black population,” he said.
Amy Murrell Taylor
Swartz taps a range of experts to fill in the gaps in historical knowledge omitted on the monument, such as what life was like for slaves in the area during the war.
“In Jessamine County, an enslaved person was working in the fields cultivating various crops, including hemp, and was directly watched and surveilled and had their time carefully controlled, and they could not make the choice to leave at any time,” University of Kentucky historian Amy Murrell Taylor explains in the first episode.
“They lived under the threat of having their family members sold down South into Mississippi through the slave trade. So enslaved people in Jessamine lived with all the threats and the fears that were endemic to slavery. It was certainly not a better kind of slavery here.”
Swartz also interviews Moses Radford, pastor of First Baptist Church, a Black congregation located just two blocks from the statue.
Moses Radford
As protests were ramping up in 2020, Swartz asked Radford if he always wanted the memorial removed.
“I didn’t pay any attention to it,” the pastor responded. “I’ve been here for 29 years. I’ve been in the courthouse several times, of course, but I didn’t pay any attention to it, period.”
That changed when the minister read a Facebook post about the statue being highly offensive on the courthouse lawn, and he called to get an explanation.
“Now that I know what it is, it means a sign of hatred, a sign of bigotry, racism. It is a sign that Blacks are inferior and whites are superior. ‘We’re the master, y’all the slaves.’”
Swartz says the data support Radford’s interpretation of the memorial.
“When I looked at newspaper articles about the history of the statue, advertisements by local business repeatedly said, ‘we serve white people only.’ That’s the social world that put up the statue. They were put off by the specter of racial equality.”
With the statue still in place in 2025, Swartz said he hopes the podcast and its accompanying website might inspire more civil discourse about race and help people learn the difference between honoring history and honoring the past.
“The past is what actually happened, but so much of the past is inaccessible,” he said. “History is a construction, it’s interpretive and that’s what all memorials are. And if that’s the case, we ought to think about reimagining how we might change our county courthouse lawn as our values change.”
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