The (Im)Movable Monument Identity, Space, and The Louisville Confederate Monument Joy M. Giguere ABSTRACT: Despite Kentucky’s status as a Union state during the Civil War, the Louisville Confederate Soldiers’ Monument, erected in 1895 by the Kentucky Confederate Women’s Monument Association, is a representative example of Confederate mem- orialization in the South. Its history through the twentieth century, culminating in the creation of the nearby Freedom Park to counterbalance the monument’s symbolism and its ultimate removal and relocation to nearby Brandenburg, Kentucky, in 2017, reveals the relationship between such monuments and the Lost Cause, urban devel- opment, public history, and public memory. Using the Louisville Confederate Monu- ment as a case study, this essay considers the ways in which Confederate monuments not only reflect the values of the people who erected them, but ultimately shape and are shaped by their environments. KEY WORDS: Confederate monument, Lost Cause, public memory, urban development, white supremacy, counter-monument On Saturday, November 19, 2016, a construction crew removed the 70-foot-tall Confederate Soldiers’ Monument that had sat on Third Street in Louisville, Ken- tucky, for 121 years. Adorned with two bronze soldiers at the base and one atop a four-sided shaft with a crossed-rifle design on the column’s capital, the monu- ment was constructed and dedicated in 1895 following nearly a decade of fundrais- ing by the Kentucky Women’s Confederate Monument Association. The monument had been the subject of various protests and controversies for years, but the announcement of the decision to finally bring it down came a week after University of Louisville (U of L) professor Ricky Jones, chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies, wrote an impassioned letter to the city’s newspaper, The Courier-Journal, demanding that the time had come for Mayor Greg Fischer and U of L President James Ramsey to take action. For 20 years, I have walked by that towering granite and bronze eyesore glorifying the nadir of America’s past. For 20 years, I have listened to cries for its removal. For 20 years, we have been plagued by confusion, compromises, THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 56–82 (November 2019). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576. © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.4.56. 56