On a midsummer afternoon 110 years ago, officials in Mobile unveiled a statue of Rev. Abram Joseph Ryan in front of what used to be St. Joseph’s Church.

One city commissioner, Pat J. Lyons, described Ryan as a beloved poet and priest whose writing “left a more enduring monument than can be erected by the hand of man,” according to a record of the event from the Library of Congress.

What wasn’t mentioned in the unveiling ceremony were Ryan’s beliefs about racial segregation, white supremacy and misogyny, views he advocated in the pages of local newspapers.

Today, the statue still stands near the intersection of Spring Hill Avenue and Broad Street in Mobile, a predominantly Black city, in a park named for Ryan. The statue’s epitaph dubs him the “Priest of the Confederacy.”

A group of concerned community members on Monday night sent a letter and petition to Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson and the city council, urging them to remove the statue and rename Ryan Park.

“If we, as a city, continue to honor Ryan, then the City of Mobile is maintaining a hostile, community environment that is disgraceful to our community, to the clergy, and to generations past, present, and future,” the letter reads. “As we all know, racist ideologies, like Ryan’s, have no place in any community’s public spaces.”

A city spokesperson confirmed they received the letter and told AL.com that city officials are currently discussing the information cited in it.

At the unveiling on July 12, 1913, Erwin Craighead, the chairman of the committee to erect the statue, said it was funded in large part by dimes donated from children in a campaign advertised by The Mobile Register in 1904, event records from the Library of Congress show.

On a recent visit to the park, the base of the statue was littered with trash and surrounded by patches of dirt and dying grass.

Several tributes honor Ryan throughout the South, including a Catholic high school named after him in Nashville. The Daughters of the Confederacy and Children of the Confederacy donated stained-glass windows in his honor in various locations, including one in Mobile at St. Mary’s Catholic Church where he was once a pastor. A monument to Father Ryan was vandalized multiple times and toppled in New Orleans in 2020.

Leo Denton, a retired instructor at the University of South Alabama, organized the petition which has 184 signatures in support of removing the statue. He shared a copy of the petition and letter to the city with AL.com.

He said he noticed the statue while attending a Black Lives Matter march three years ago and realized he didn’t know about Ryan and his history.

“I saw the statue and thought to myself, ‘Wow, Mobile has a statue of a saint,’ and, you know, I felt really good about it,” Denton said. “I did not pick up through the whole march that the Ryan statue was a Confederate statue at all.”

Denton said he doesn’t think of himself as much of an activist, but he was curious about this bit of local history.

He learned through quick research that Ryan was being honored as a Confederate, poet and chaplain of the South, and that “concerned” him, but he didn’t think much of it at first. “That didn’t necessarily mean that he was a white supremacist or that he passionately promulgated racist, white supremacist ideologies,” he said.

But as he continued researching, Denton said, he stumbled upon some of Ryan’s writings.

Denton and a few other Mobillians included quotes in their letter to the city this week.

“We hold that the White Race is superior to the Black, as a general principle, and that the Government of the United States and its several subordinate State and Municipal Governments belong to the white people of the land,” he penned in The Banner of the South, a newspaper based in Augusta, Georgia, in 1869. He was the editor of the publication.

In The Banner a few years earlier, Ryan discussed the moral quandary of allowing women the right to vote.

“If suffrage is a natural right, why not be logical and consistent, and extend it to all women, boys, children, and idiots?” he said. “Suffrage, then, being a civil or political privilege … the State, alone, should confer the privilege, and give to the worthy and intelligent the right to vote, without leaving them … to the mercy of the vile herd of ignorant Voudooists.”

Candace Cooksey, communications director for the city of Mobile released this statement to AL.com on Wednesday: “We did recently receive communications from Mr. Joe Denton regarding the statue of Father Ryan in Ryan Park. We are looking into the information he provided and have begun discussing it internally and with members of the Mobile City Council.”

The statue appears to be protected under the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act. The act, which Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law in 2017, prohibits the “relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance of any monument located on public property which has been in place for 40 years or more,” according to the Alabama Historical Commission.

The Father Ryan statue has been in place since 1913.

Both Birmingham and Mobile have removed statues since 2017 and voluntarily paid fines of $25,000.

Denton said he is “incredibly grateful” to those who signed the petition, people who have “clearly voiced their opposition to racism and clearly supported the dignity and human rights of all persons in our community.”

“I believe, because of their voices, and because of the good values of our community, that the statue of (Father) Ryan, a staunch white-supremacist, will be removed and the park will be renamed.”