Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Tuesday that a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Civil War president of the Confederate States, should be removed from the Kentucky state capitol.
McConnell’s suggestion comes after politicians in other states considered removing the Confederate symbols from state capitol grounds after last week’s mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., which appeared to have been racially motivated.
“With regard to my own state, we curiously enough have a statue of Jefferson Davis in the capitol in Frankfort,” McConnell said at a Senate news conference. “Davis’ sole connection to Kentucky was he was born there, he subsequently moved to Mississippi. And Kentucky of course did not secede from the union.”
McConnell took issue with “the appropriateness of continuing to have Jefferson Davis’ statue in a very prominent place in our state capitol.”
He suggested that perhaps “a better place for that would be the Kentucky History Museum, which is also in the state capital.”
Kentucky Republican gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin earlier Tuesday released a statement saying that removing the Davis statue would be “appropriate,” according to Bloomberg Politics.
Watch the video below, from television station WKYT:
