NOTE: This piece was originally published at our Substack newsletter A Public Witness.
As historian David Swartz conducted research for a book on how American evangelicals were working to combat human trafficking in Southeast Asia, the COVID-19 pandemic started and shut down his travel. So he grabbed his handheld recorder and started documenting protests and conversations in his Kentucky community about a local Confederate statue. The result is a high-quality, seven-episode narrative podcast series that just released: Rebel on Main.
“The ‘Rebel on Main’ is a Confederate statue in Jessamine County, Kentucky, and that’s the county where I live,” Swartz told me on this week’s episode of Dangerous Dogma. “What drew my attention to it really was just how bizarre it is once you get to know it a little bit. He wears a Confederate belt buckle and a Union hat. So in the project, the podcast, I try to figure out how it got that way. And it turns out it’s a perfect representation of the county’s identity in the Civil War. This is a very divided county that supplied equal number of troops to each side of the war, to the Confederates and the Union. And so it’s a divided county in a divided state in a divided country.”
“Of course, the podcast isn’t just about this statue. It’s about the social world that built it, that constructed it in 1896,” Swartz added. “It’s about Jessamine County right now. A lot of contemporary characters, including a 15-year-old homeschool student who starts a petition to destroy the statue. It includes an interracial group of ministers who want to remove it, if not destroy it. I talk with a neighbor of mine who uses the statue as a wedge issue to try to get Republicans elected in the election year of 2020, and then, of course, our beleaguered county judge executive who’s caught in the middle of all of it. And so as I think back on those hot summer months of 2020, it was kind of a wild time. There’s COVID, there’s religion, there’s contentious politics. What could possibly go wrong as my county tries to figure out what to do with this thing?”
Swartz, a professor of history at Asbury University, is the author of books like Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism and Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity. But this project isn’t just a different medium; it’s also more personal as he talks with his neighbors, explores his community’s hidden ghosts, and ponders aloud his own biases. As Swartz tells the stories — past and present — he complicates the narratives we often hear. Historical heroes aren’t always so heroic, past villains aren’t one-dimensionally evil, and contemporary voices don’t neatly fall into just two opposing camps.
“People are complicated. Stories are complicated. Times and eras are complicated. And so I really try to get at the complexity of history,” he told me. “I think more than other historical projects that I’ve done in the past, I think I felt the weight of history more this time. That kind of surprised me, although looking back it makes a lot of sense. I’m living in a particular place, and, of course, I’m going to feel it.”
“It really reminded me of the old line from James Baldwin as he describes what American history is. He says it’s ‘more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it,’” Swartz added. “I saw that right here. Even as I drive through the county, it’s a beautiful place. There are stone fences there. It’s the rolling hills of the Bluegrass. The people are hospitable. They’re beautiful people. They’ll do anything for you, and I talk about that in one of the episodes. On the other hand, it’s a terrible place. And I think our county, I think our nation tends to whitewash a lot of those terrible things. So I think one of the burdens of this project is to pretty directly articulate ways in which our past is fraught. This has been a place of slavery, of Jim Crow, of terrible lynchings.”
Protesters in front of the ‘Rebel on Main’ statue in 2020. (Lisa Weaver Swartz/Rebel on Main)
Thus far, the Confederate statue on Main Street in Jessamine County, Kentucky, remains standing. But the myths propping him aren’t as stable after Swartz’s important project.
You can hear more from David Swartz on this week’s episode of Dangerous Dogma. You can listen to the audio version here (or subscribe in your favorite podcast platform), and you can watch the video version here. You can also listen to his show Rebel on Main on the show’s website or in your favorite podcast platform.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
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