SELMA, Ala. (AP) – It’s not the first Confederate monument to go missing in Selma, Alabama, but the story of the stolen Jefferson Davis chair may be the oddest.
How to steal a chair that weighed maybe 500 pounds (225 kilograms)? Who was the group “White Lies Matter” that appeared to have stolen the chair to make a statement about how we remember the Confederacy? What of the ransom demand that didn’t ask for money, but included threats of a scatological nature? And how did the chair end up 300 miles (480 kilometers) away in New Orleans?
It all started at the nearly 200-year-old Live Oak Cemetery in the city known for its civil rights history. Marchers demonstrating for voting rights were brutally beaten by authorities as they tried to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, in an event known as Bloody Sunday.
On March 20, the Selma chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy reported to police that the carved limestone monument shaped like a chair and honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis was gone. They put the chair’s value at $500,000.
That figure alone got people talking in Selma.