Long before the Civil War, Lexington’s courthouse square, known as Cheapside Park (now Henry A. Tandy Park), was the largest locality for the slave trade in the American South. The site also prominently featured two monuments that honored Confederate slave owners John C. Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan. In 2015, the Morgan statue was spray-painted with the words “Black Lives Matter,” which sparked community dialogue that questioned the relevance of Confederate statuary in the public sphere and addressed the trauma that those symbols produce. Since then, a coalition of people banded together to petition their local government to remove the statues and re-imagine Cheapside as a place of inclusion, edification, and healing.