No longer set in stone

Randolph College chooses to remove statue of local Confederate soldier

 

Randolph College has made monumental changes to its campus after the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees elected to remove the statue of a Confederate soldier and local philanthropist, George Morgan Jones, from its campus.

 

The statue, removed Aug. 25, depicted Jones in a Confederate general’s uniform on top of a plinth with an inscription commemorating his help developing the college.

 

Currently, the plinth remains in its original location.

 

“Randolph still wants to honor what George Morgan Jones did for the college,” Vice President and Chief of Staff Wesley Fugate said.

 

“He was an important philanthropist for us. He suggested Lynchburg as the site for then Randolph Macon Woman’s College.”

 

In addition to the plinth, a portrait of Jones still hangs in the library, to which he donated funding.

 

According to Randolph’s president, Bradley Bateman, the committee decided to remove the statue in light of the national situation, referring to riots in Charlottesville, Virginia and the removal of a similar monument in Baltimore.

 

“If we were to have gained attention for debating the presence of a statue of a Confederate soldier on our campus, it is quite possible that armed white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis would have descended on our campus to ‘protect’ the statue or simply to express their support for keeping it where it is,” Bateman said in a statement released on the college’s website.

 

“Thus, prudent behavior required removing the statue now before it could become an issue.”

 

Fugate said talk of removing the statue had been circulating since the 1980s.

 

“Certainly, the events in Charlottesville and the threat of potential harm to our students and our campus community expedited conversations, but the thought about this and the discussions about this have been going on for many years at the college,” Fugate said.

 

According to a biography written by Thomas Markham from the George Morgan Jones Memorial Library, Jones is regarded as one of Lynchburg’s first businessmen.

 

He was the first president of the Lynchburg Board of Trade, the president of the National Exchange Bank for 20 years and responsible for the construction of the first library in Lynchburg.

 

“George Morgan Jones had built a record of strict integrity, business ability, unaltered devotion to duty and public spirit seldom equaled,” Markham said in the biography.

 

According to Randolph’s Director of College Relations Brenda Edson, though the statue depicts Jones in an officer’s uniform, he never rose above the rank of private and served as a cook during his military career.

 

“On a college campus, that’s a pretty important thing for it to be factually correct, and being in a uniform of an officer when you’re not is not accurate,” Edson said.

 

According to Fugate, there are talks of bringing the statue back but of disassociating Jones’s Confederate participation from his philanthropy.

 

“We will see where it goes in the future, but I think there is desire to have conversations about how we can contextualize the statue as an important part of our history, but one that shows that there are some challenging parts in our history as well,” Fugate said.

 

Edson said the founder of Randolph College, William Waugh Smith, was also a part of the Confederacy, but there is no statue present of him in a Confederate uniform.

 

“We honor him all over campus,” Edson said.

 

“However he’s not honored for that role in the Confederacy. We can still show our appreciation and respect for him as a founder the same as we can for George Morgan Jones. It’s the context in which they are presented that makes the difference.”

 

According to Edson, the intention of removing the statue is not an attempt to change history.

 

“You’re not ignoring the history,” Edson said.

 

“You’re not wiping it clean, you’re not pretending that it didn’t happen. But you’re also not glorifying something that we feel wasn’t right.”

 

Panyard is the news editor.

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