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On the Jessamine County Fiscal Court front lawn is a Confederate soldier statue. 

“No braver bled

For brighter land

Nor greater land

Had a cause so grand,” reads one of the four sides of the statue, commemorating the Confederate dead.

In February, historian David Swartz published a seven-episode podcast series investigating the statue and the history surrounding it, highlighting the dark past of the county’s slave-holding history and reconstruction era and the people who either hold the statue and its history in their hearts with pain or with protection and pride. 

Swartz described his initial reaction upon noticing the statue, “when I moved here 12 or 13 years ago, walking by the statue into the courthouse to pay my vehicle registration fees and driving by it every week taking my kids to orchestra practice at East Jessamine Middle School, It felt like southern exoticism. I’m from Ohio, I went to graduate school in Indiana, and I lived in Illinois for a while; I’m totally midwestern, from north of the Mason-Dixon line, and crossing that line made a big difference. I was struck by the existence of this statue in such a prominent place.”

But discovering the depth of Jessamine County’s history only intrigued Swartz more. “Soon after I arrived, somebody pointed me down to Camp Nelson National Monument, which was this Union supply depot and emancipation center [during the Civil War]. I was struck by the contrast between them and how they’re almost like dueling monuments in a single county narrating fundamentally different stories about the same event and the same place.”

Swartz is a historian of religious history in the 20th century and a professor at Asbury University. He has written a book about religion and is working on a biography of the county’s Confederate statue.

He would bring his students at Asbury to the courthouse to survey the streetscape and analyze the area. He’d do this year after year before he began researching its history with students and independently on a deeper level. “Where did it come from, when was it installed, what did it mean at that moment,” Swartz said.

The events of the summer of 2020 inspired Swartz to start his podcast. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the Black Lives Matter protests that emerged right by the Confederate statue. Also, a then-teenaged Jenna Sparks, a local homeschool student, had started a petition at the time to remove the confederate statue, and an interracial group of ministers had come together to focus on racial issues that eventually included the discussion of the statue as well. 

“The historical research began to feel very immediate at that moment. I think some of my journalistic tendencies kicked in a little bit, and I began covering it. I bought an H5 Zoom recorder, pulled it out, showed up at the protest, and interviewed everyone I could find, including participants, Judge Executive David West, and former magistrates that showed up to watch,” Swartz said.

“We don’t talk about how the battles went down, how the wars were won, and things like that. We focus more on the significance and meaning of them. So, for example, with the Civil War, you’ve got African Americans narrating the war as a war for emancipation. Then, you have a lot of white unionists narrating it in the decades after the war as the cause being to keep the union together. Then you have Confederate veterans who say this was a lost cause; this was a good cause. They narrate it as confederate courage and bravery. But then, in the century and a half since the Civil War happened, you have all these interpretations, and they wax and wane over time, so by the time you get to the civil rights movement, you see a diminishing of the lost cause narrative and a heightening of the emancipationist narrative. And that is the dominant narrative that is told almost nationwide. and yet, this confederate statue is standing at the most prominent place in the entire county. The civic center. (Across the street from the historically Black neighborhood of Herveytown).”

His first episode is an entrance into the story, relying on individuals like Pastor Moses Radford, the city’s First Baptist Church pastor for the last 33 years. Radford’s perspective is included throughout the series, including his own lived experience as a Black man and his participation and leadership among the interracial group of ministers coming together in 2020. Historian Amy Murrell Taylor is also interviewed, telling the history of Camp Nelson, including its expulsion of formerly enslaved refugees from the Union camp in 1864 that killed 100 women and children. 

“Kentucky was pro-union and pro-slavery. A quarter of a million black people were enslaved here,” Swartz said.

Interviews with 2020 protestors and speakers are sprinkled throughout the series– including a 30-something-year veteran of the Jessamine County police force who spoke in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and against the statue. 

In episode two, Swartz interviews Brandon, an armed defender of the statue, and includes in the episode a conversation between himself, Judge West, and Brandon. He also recounts the history of the statue and that it wasn’t always Confederate, and how its unveiling drew a raucous 3,000-person crowd to the court house. 

Episode three, “Ghosts of Jessamine,” focuses on the untold stories and treatment of Black people in Jessamine County over the last 200 years, including the history of over a dozen lynchings and Jim Crow Codes in the county. Maren McGimsey learned that on her property is a cemetery of enslaved people. As a former paralegal, McGimsey is followed by Swartz through her thorough research at the Jessamine County Clerk’s Office. 

“The biggest problem is slavery as an institution worked on erasure,” McGimsey said in the podcast. “Even if there were a space for the name of the mother of a child who was born enslaved, they wouldn’t put it [in a record book]. And they wouldn’t put the name of the father; they would put the name of the enslaver.” 

He also interviewed historian of religion and Eastern Kentucky University professor Carolyn Dupont. She explains how reconstruction was a horrible period of violence against Black Americans. 

“In Jessamine County, the prejudice and violence continued well past reconstruction. The first surviving issues of the Jessamine Journal appeared in 1887. And they are awful. Article after article uses [derogatory terms] to refer to Black people,” In this episode, Swartz looks through microfilm of old copies of the Jessamine Journal. 

Episode four focuses on the precocious Jenna Sparks, who started the petition to remove the Confederate monument. Episode five includes a conversation with Archeologist Dr. Stephen McBride, specifically his work unearthing history at Camp Nelson. Calvonia Radford, the wife of Pastor Radford, who has worked hard to curate and preserve local Black history, “We don’t have a lot of written history, other than what we have in the family bible. You’ll see fat bibles you know that have all that stuff stuck in them kind of archived informally to hold onto things,” Radford said. 

Episode six features an interview with Swartz’s neighbor, a Canadian transplant named Bob Barney, who spends rescheduled times calling up pro-statue Democrats to switch parties. This episode also chronicles a Blue Lives Matter rally held at the courthouse. Episode seven brings us to the statue’s current status. 

Since the release of the first few episodes of “Rebel on Main,” Swartz said, “I haven’t gotten a lot of reaction yet, but the reaction I have gotten is at all points of the spectrum. I’ve heard some complaints that I’m an outsider, even though I’ve lived here for 15 years, who is just stirring up trouble. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from African Americans in the county and other folks; it runs the spectrum.”

With this series, Swartz said he wanted to galvanize the issue of racial justice and the Confederate statue and start a conversation. “A real conversation. Not the smoke-filled backroom conversations that I know have been happening for the past four years. The public one, where there can be some education done that’s more than a fifteen-minute session at the back end of a county magistrates meeting, where people are just talking past each other, and the magistrates sit there and listen and don’t engage. I get why they don’t want to. It’s politically fraught; it’s possible they could be voted out of office, but we need to see some courage. We need the courage for a conversation. I’m not gonna prescribe what should happen, but my goodness, we’ve got to talk about it out loud.” 

All seven episodes of “Rebel on Main” can be listened to for free anywhere you get your podcasts or even on the series’ website at rebelonmain.com, which includes the episodes, episode notes, characters in the episodes, transcripts, and videos and photos Swartz has found throughout his research.