The price for the relic's return? Not cash, but a demand that the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond hang a banner quoting a Black radical on Friday, the 156th anniversary of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at the end of the Civil War.
The Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair, which was first reported missing from Live Oak Cemetery in Selma last month, is an ornately carved stone chair that was dedicated in 1893 to the Confederate president's memory and is estimated to be worth $500,000.
White Lies Matter demanded the UDC, which is responsible for many of the nation's Confederate statues and memorials, hang a banner it said it had already provided on its headquarters in Richmond, Va. The banner reads: "The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives," which is a quote by Assata Shakur.
The group cited U.S. history as their motive for the theft:
"America's original sin is that people were kidnapped from their homes and forced to build one of the most prosperous nations in the world, without being allowed to participate in it … We decided, in the spirit of such ignominious traditions, to kidnap a chair instead. Jefferson Davis doesn't need it anymore. He's long dead. To be honest, he never even had the chance to sit in it in the first place."
Davis died in 1889, four years before the chair was dedicated. He was a Mississippi native and had not visited Selma for decades before his death.
"Like most Confederate monuments," the White Lies Matter email continued, "[the chair] mostly exists to remind those who's freedom had to be purchased in blood, that there still exists a portion of our country that is more than willing to continue to spill blood to avoid paying that debt down."
