The Only Monument in the United States Dedicated to an Assassin

President Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C. and died the next morning. He was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who later became a notorious household name.

Prior to his role in the President’s murder, Booth was a young, handsome, American stage actor. He even won Southern hearts during a performance of Richard III in Montgomery, AL five years before his gruesome crime. He was charismatic, attractive, and talented; however, he also detested President Lincoln and everything he stood for.

Booth was pro-slavery and anti-immigration: he even used his travels as a performer to further his own political agenda.

Pinky Parker

Joseph Pinkney Parker was born in Coffee County, AL to a wealthy family on August 16, 1839. He fought in the Civil War, under the command of General Robert E. Lee. In fact, he was among the soldiers that surrendered on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. This didn't mean that ole "Pinky" saw the error of his ways or changed his beliefs.

When he returned home from the war, he discovered that like a lot of Southern plantations, his house had been burned, members of his family killed, his livestock taken, and all of his slaves were gone. In post-Civil War terms, this also meant that his family’s money was also now gone.

Parker married and he and his wife began farming, but soon found out just how unforgiving and exhausting farming really is. The couple and their three children moved to Troy, AL and bought a house on Madison Street.

Parker worked as grocery store clerk, a cotton compress worker, and then as a policeman. His position as a public servant did nothing to negate his hatred of Abraham Lincoln, whom he had a personal vendetta against. He felt that Lincoln had caused all of his problems due to his role in freeing the slaves, which meant big income for the Southern states.

Every year on April 15, Parker would march through the streets of downtown Troy wearing his finest clothes and a button displaying the words “Death of Old Abe Lincoln” and the date of Lincoln’s death.

A local newspaper story even referred to him as “the bitterest rebel in the South”. It wasn’t long before his antics resulted in the loss of his friends, and he was eventually forced to leave the Baptist Church that he attended.

41 years after Lincoln’s assassination, in 1906, Parker bought a 3-foot-tall block of granite and went to work. He had it inscribed with the words “Erected by Pink Parker in honor of John Wilkes Booth for killing Old Abe Lincoln”.

After it was completed, Parker tried earnestly to donate his “memorial” to the city for it to be placed on the town square. However, the city council refused to accept it, so Parker placed it in his yard on Madison Street. Here, it remained for the next 15 years until Parker’s death in 1921.

The same year, news outlets across the country received false information claiming that the City of Troy had raised local funds in order to have the monument carved and displayed. Articles criticizing Pink Parker and the small Alabama town ran in publications such as The Washington Post, The Brooklyn Eagle, The St Louis Post-Dispatch, and other large newspapers.

Upon Parker’s death, he was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, where his beloved monument was placed atop his grave. After Parker died, his sons took the monument to a stone cutter and had the original inscription removed, replacing it with Parker’s grave marker information, where it still remains.

***Story previously published on Medium.com by the author***