by Cento Staff
On October 17th, 4:15pm, a statue of the Supreme Court Justice and Centre alumnus John Marshall Harlan, class of 1850, was unveiled in Rogers Plaza to kick off Homecoming weekend. This statue was designed and sculpted by Ed Hamilton, the renowned Louisville artist who also sculpted the Abraham Lincolin statue in front of Crounse Hall. According to Centre College News, “The design centers around the idea of a seemingly immovable wall that begins to fall and becomes a path over time — symbolically capturing the story of Harlan’s dissents, which may not have won the day, but have stood the test of time.”
However, before the statue was unveiled, a dissenter stood for what they believed. A student stood and said: “John Marshall Harlan was a xenophobe. I am not happy as a Centre student that we are allowing this kind of performance. I am doubly embarrassed that the trustees have ignored our calls to not have this statue on this campus. We will not be silenced as the students of this campus.” The student was then arrested by police officers. As of writing, the student is currently released from detainment.
Otherwise, the ceremony proceeded as normal. On the list of invited speakers at the unveiling were three Kentucky politicians: Democratic Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman, Republican U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, and Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman. Jacqueline Coleman, a Centre alumna born in nearby Burgin, Kentucky, was the first of the political speakers. As a former public school teacher, she stressed the importance of education as a means of preparing young people for future public service and leadership, as Centre did for both John Marshall Harlan and herself. She also cautioned that in our current political moment, we are veering dangerously away from Harlan’s vision of equality under the law and equal application of Constitutional rights to everyone in our country.
Longtime U.S. Senator and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the next political speaker. He professed that he had always been a great admirer of the Great Dissenter and even hung a portrait of Harlan in his office in Washington, D.C. McConnell emphasized the courage of one man standing alone against the world, and compared him to Martin Luther King, Jr., who McConnell saw give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech while an intern in D.C. in 1963. The Republican senator also praised Harlan for his political prowess in growing the nascent Republican Party, which McConnell called “the party of Lincoln,” in Kentucky.
Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman was the last politician to take the podium. He was the only speaker at the event to directly address the protest in his remarks, asserting that it was typical of disruptive behavior by uninformed young people with no regard for history and a lack of critical thinking. He largely echoed Senator McConnell’s points, including another rhetorical gesture to the “party of Lincoln,” while also emphasizing Harlan’s public service and leadership as Attorney General of Kentucky, a role Coleman himself now inhabits.
Ben J. Beaton, class of ’03, Judge, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky and Centre Trustee also shared remarks about Harlan at the unveiling: “He is not presented as a removed, untouchable, historical figure, because he’s one of us. Not because he was perfect or left a perfect world behind. Because he was purposeful, you don’t see him sitting there satisfied, but he’s still at work, pen in hand.”
However, clearly, students are mixed about the honoring of this specific alumnus. So, who was John Marshall Harlan? Why is he celebrated, and why is he controversial?
The Cento as an organization is non-partisan. While many authors may share their own political beliefs, the newspaper itself does not endorse any particular viewpoint. We instead take our cue from historian Peter S. Canellos, who in his remarks at the unveiling of the statue encouraged Centre students to grapple with and debate these lingering questions about Harlan’s legacy. Our goal in covering this topic is to provide you with facts and perspectives to allow students, faculty, staff and the wider community to come to their own conclusions and be able to contribute to a necessary and informed debate on these issues.
John Marshall Harlan: Brief Biography
John Marshall Harlan was born in what is now Boyle County into a prominent slaveholding family and was raised with his mixed race half-brother, Robert Harlan. He went on to be a member of Centre’s graduating class of 1850. In 1854, John Marshall Harlan married Malvina Shanklin, a devout abolitionist from Indiana. Despite his wife’s views, slavery continued in the Harlan household.
In Harlan’s early political career, he was a member of the Whig Party, and after its dissolution, the Know-Nothing Party—a nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic political party which he later disavowed. During the Civil War, John Marshall Harlan fought for the Union, but defended slavery and criticized abolitionists, going so far as threatening to quit the army if President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Despite his promise to quit in that scenario, however, it wasn’t until his father died in March 1863 that “John was forced to resign and return home to manage the Harlan estate, which included a dozen slaves,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. He refused to free these slaves whom he had inherited from his father until slavery was made unconstitutional by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment—which Harlan opposed as federal overreach—in December 1865, months after the war had ended.
During the Reconstruction period after the war, his beliefs shifted dramatically, eventually labeling the institution of slavery as “the most perfect despotism that ever existed on this earth.” The Smithsonian Magazine describes how he joined the Republican Party as a supporter of the Reconstruction, was elected Attorney General of Kentucky, and “was instrumental in the eventual victory of the party’s presidential candidate in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes was quick to show his appreciation by nominating Harlan to the Supreme Court the following year. Harlan’s confirmation was slowed by his past support for discriminatory measures.”
John Marshall Harlan was eventually confirmed to the Supreme Court at the end of 1877 and served until his death in 1911. Over time, he came to be known as the “Great Dissenter,” and he was often the lone dissenter in cases in which he argued in favor of civil rights for African Americans, workers’ rights, a federal income tax and many other issues. Many of his dissenting opinions would shape majority opinions decades later as the Court gradually evolved to accept his views.
By far the most well-known of these cases is Plessy v. Ferguson. In this 8-1 case, Harlan was the only Justice to argue that a Louisiana law enforcing racial segregation on streetcars was unconstitutional. He forcefully argued in his dissent that “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Harlan’s dissent in Plessy was a crucial piece of Thurgood Marshall’s argument before the Supreme Court a half century later in Brown v. Board of Education, which finally outlawed racial segregation in the United States.
However, in that same dissenting opinion in Plessy, Justice Harlan also used racist and xenophobic language against Chinese Americans to support his argument. He wrote: “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race [cannot].” Rather than extend his idea of a colorblind Constitution to people of all races, including Asian Americans, Harlan used the reality of anti-Asian discrimination to argue that the law barring Black people from riding in the same streetcar as white people was unconstitutional because it treated Chinese people, whom he considered to be unfit for citizenship, even worse than Black citizens.
In another pivotal case involving Chinese Americans’ constitutional right to birthright citizenship, Harlan again joined the dissenting minority. While the majority of the Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was legally a United States citizen due to the Fourteenth Amendment’s clear language establishing birthright citizenship, Harlan disagreed. He instead argued that Wong Kim Ark had no right to U.S. citizenship despite being born in the United States, and should have been barred from re-entering the country under the Chinese Exclusion Act. In a lecture to law students about the case, he justified this xenophobic view based on his idea “that this is a race utterly foreign to us and never will assimilate with us.” He further argued that without the Chinese Exclusion Act and the denial of citizenship to Chinese Americans, they “would have rooted out the American population,” echoing the white supremacist Great Replacement theory and racist fears that immigration from nonwhite countries would cause white people to lose their privileged position in American society. He repeated many of these racist and xenophobic prejudices against Asians and Asian American immigrants in both his private correspondence and public lectures.
Some scholars point to Harlan’s dissents in the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court cases in the early 1900s that explored whether the Constitution applied to territories newly acquired through the annexation of Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, to claim that his racial views had continued to evolve after the Spanish-American War. In these dissents, including some in which he was the sole dissenter and some in which he was joined by other Justices, Harlan argued that the Constitution should apply to these territories and the residents of all races within them. However, some scholars question whether he had truly moved on from his racial prejudice against Asians, as he did not argue that the residents of these territories were entitled to U.S. citizenship (nor did he contest the legality or morality of the imperialist acquisition of these territories). In most of these dissents, his primary preoccupation was with the technical and legal questions of the case, not the racist logic underpinning the majority’s decisions. He was also most troubled by the prospect of white American soldiers in these territories not receiving the full protection of the Constitution while stationed there, not the infringement on the native populations’ rights.
Dissenting Opinions
The Cento had the opportunity to have an interview with the protesting student, who we will refer to henceforth as Student A.
Student A took issue with the selection of John Marshall Harlan as a figure to honor in statue. While they noted that “he did dissent in the Plessy versus Ferguson case,” nonetheless “he was opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation, he was opposed to the 13th and 14th Amendments,” and that he believed that “Chinese immigrants who came to America and had children—those children should not be considered US citizens.” In particular, Student A said that “that one … was problematic, especially during this day and age where we are fighting anti-immigration laws, and birthright citizenship is back on the docket for conversation.”
Student A told us their story of their protest, stating: “I decided to protest him in the way that I did when I arrived. I expected there to be more students who were speaking out, because I had had many conversations that day with individuals who were upset with the statue being placed here on campus, and when I realized that no one else was really feeling the same energy I was… I was still feeling called to speak out against it. I’m hurt for my fellow students who are under persecution at the moment, and decided that my being alone, and it being one individual, would be more impactful than if it had been a group.”
Student A said they think that “erecting such a statue on a college campus which prides itself in global citizenship is offensive to the students on campus … who are on student visas and are scared for their statuses,” and that “it’s grossly inappropriate and disrespectful to the professors and faculty who spoke out against the erection of such a statue. When they were asked whether they thought it was a good idea or not, they almost unanimously decided that it was not a good idea and presented that to the administration.” Student A continued and expressed their frustration that “our administration felt it was better to appeal to those who had the bag, and went with the trustees’ money, which supplied the statue.”
Student A was promptly met by the police after their act of protest. DPS tried to obtain custody of the student, but police had already arrested them. Currently, they are facing a charge for a class B misdemeanor of disorderly conduct. Student A shared that “[The administration] believed that my standing and yelling would raise anxiety in the crowd … because of that, they have labeled it as violence. Do I think that that was a violent thing to do? Maybe. Maybe that is political violence. But if that is political violence, then the institution of this statue is 1000 times more politically violent.”
Furthermore, Student A shared a call to action for Centre as a community: “I would love to see the removal of the statue first and foremost, and for Centre to begin to provide resources for those students who are affected by these political events right now. And I feel that if they want to create more spaces on campus, they should be open spaces for the students that are currently on campus, instead of taking away places for conversation and discussion, as they have done with the lawn in front of the statue.”
Meanwhile, other students have expressed frustration about the notion of tuition dollars being directed toward the statue and plaza remodeling efforts. However, no tuition money was used for the statues—only donations for the express purpose of the plaza and statue. Other students have criticized the lack of campus community input in the project, which was approved by the Board of Trustees in 2022. Other students felt inconvenienced by the speedy construction of the remodeled plaza, with the sprinklers watering the grass posing a hazard on the nearby sidewalks.
In response to distaste for the statue, Centre administration has made no public comment. However, Centre administration has installed a camera on the tree behind the statue, especially since there has been various discourse on the social media platform, Yik Yak, about defacing the monument.
The Cento invites students to continue this conversation and act as a facilitator for the expression of a range of diverse opinions. To contact us, email thecento.centre@gmail.com, or DM us on Instagram, at @thecento.centre.