Four history teachers at Murray State have signed their names to a proposition to hide the statue of once President Jefferson Davis from public view. By doing this they propose to hide the most important event in the history of the United States of America: the Civil War.
The War of Independence gave birth to a nation. The Civil War was the terrible transition to national manhood and Jefferson Davis is the figure that makes Abraham Lincoln stand out as the man who held the union together and freed the slaves.
By hiding the statue of Davis, the man who was President of the Confederacy, do they hope to obliterate the war in which 620,000 men died to determine whether we would be one nation?
Will we hide the slave ships that brought the Negro to our shores? Will we hide Jackson and all the rest who killed the Indians and took their land? Will we excise from our history books the man who killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?
This is a fool’s errand doomed to failure. I offered my book, The Shellman Story, relating the history which occurred in the 1950s, to one of the history teachers at Murray State and he refused to accept it. To be able to teach history, one must be able to see history happening. I suppose he still thinks the Civil Rights struggle began when Rosa Parks sat down on a bus.
Don’t let them do it to Jefferson Davis. Robert E. Lee may be next.
Letter from Henry A. Buchanan, Former 33-year resident of Murray