WILMINGTON — This week, two longtime downtown fixtures were vandalized: the Kenan Fountain at 5th Avenue and Market Street, and the miniature Statue of Liberty on the City Hall lawn.
According to photos sent to Port City Daily, the Kenan Fountain was tagged in red spraypaint with the word “murderer” and, several blocks away, the top of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was sprayed with similar color paint.
Related: Local group wants to move downtown Wilmington’s Kenan Fountain to Renaissance Park
The Wilmington Police Department said it was working on a more detailed response to questions about the vandalism but, currently, it’s unclear what the motive for the graffiti was or if the police have any suspects. The WPD Sting Center is currently working on the issue. The vandalism appears to have happened sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
It’s not unreasonable, however, to think the fountain’s namesakes — William R. Kenan Sr. and his wife, Mary Hargrave Kenan — may have had something to do with it. The fountain was dedicated to the Kenans by their son, William R. Kenan Jr. in the early 1920s.
William R. Kenan Sr. was a white supremacist who commanded a group of insurgents during the coup and massacre of 1898 and is reported to have machine-gunned down over two dozen Black residents — certainly enough to earn the ‘murderer’ moniker.
Last summer, before parent company Gannett killed the traditional editorial, StarNews called for the fountain to be relocated and perhaps rededicated to the Kenan family in general, instead of its shameful patriarch (Star also noted another reason — the fountain is notoriously ‘in the way,’ forcing traffic on Market Street on a precarious quasi-roundabout curve).
It’s less clear what could have motivated the vandalism of the Lady Liberty statue, which has been around since the 1950s.
By Thursday morning, city maintenance crews had coated the fountain graffiti with cleaning foam and scrubbed the Lady Liberty pedestal clean.
