Ghosts of a Lost Cause screens tonight at 7 at the Kentucky Theatre, opening Beyond Statues: A Convening on Land, Space, and Memory, a two-day gathering hosted by the Monuments Workshop at the University of Kentucky.
The documentary follows community members in Murray in their fight to relocate a Confederate monument from the Calloway County courthouse square. The effort ultimately failed.
The screening comes ten years after Take Back Cheapside successfully removed two Confederate statues from Lexington's old coutrhouse lawn, which was once one of the south's largest markets for the sale of enslaved people.
"People think about how these monuments impact Black people, but they impact white folks as well," said the film's executive producer and co-director Gerry Seavo James. "You don't have to have that vestige of bondage in a public space."
The monument in Calloway County was erected in 1917, over fifty years after the surrender of the Confederacy. James says the placement of such monuments in places of authority, like courthouse lawns, were part of targeted campaigns during the Jim Crow era.
"Most Kentuckians fought for the Union, but there are only four Union monuments in Kentucky, and thirty-plus Confederate monuments," said James.
Following the screening, co-directors James and Sherman Neal II join Take Back Cheapside co-founder Russell Allen for a moderated conversation.