I was happy to learn that the Maine Supreme Court justices are questioning the decision to place a statue of Melville Fuller at the County Court House in Augusta (“Maine Supreme Court questions Melville Fuller statue outside Kennebec courthouse,” Aug. 15).
I live in Fuller’s childhood home and knowing that he was a legislator, and as candidate for the Maine House of Representatives myself, I was curious as to who he was. I was disappointed to learn that Fuller, at the time chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, joined the majority on the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, leading to the “separate but equal” doctrine, which gave rise to the Jim Crow laws.
These laws persisted into the Sixties and resulted in segregated and inferior busing, lodging, drinking fountains, etc., and helped fuel the violence and lynchings inflicted upon black people in the United States.
Plessy v. Ferguson was only part of Fuller’s history though. He is on record of saying many other regressive statements that even for the times were backwards, racist and anti-liberty. As an outspoken opponent of Abraham Lincoln and as a member of the Illinois State Legislature, Fuller labeled the Emancipation Proclamation “unconstitutional, contrary to the rules of civilized warfare,” and “calculated to bring shame, disgrace and eternal infamy” upon the nation (Millhiser, “Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted,” 2015).
Although Fuller was influential and born in Augusta, his conduct and beliefs do not make him deserving of the honor that a prominently placed statue bestows. I agree with the members of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that “the statue should not continue to be the monument that members of the public see as they approach the courthouse.”
I believe that we in Kennebec County can have a civil and constructive conversation about the statue and what it means, and arrive at a correct and timely decision as to its removal.
Adam Turner
Augusta
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