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Should the county have decided to send the Fuller statue back to its owner?
The statue of Melville W. Fuller will be returned to its donor for $1 and will be removed from in front of the Kennebec County courthouse within a year, following a decision this week by county commissioners. In the wake of high-profile killings of Black people and months of protests nationwide about systematic racism, Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court last summer asked commissioners to consider moving the statue of the late chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and Augusta native because of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision his court presided over. The case established the separate-but-equal doctrine that paved the way for decades of racial segregation in the United States. Robert Fuller Jr. recently offered to take back the statue of his descendant, following months of debate by local officials, which he originally donated to the county eight years ago on the 125th anniversary of Melville Fuller’s appointment to the country’s highest court.
Do you agree with the county’s decision? And is there another location where the statue should be placed?
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