A group of activists is calling for the removal of a statue on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol honoring a 19th century doctor who experimented on slaves. 
 
 Alabama state Senator Hank Sanders and other members of the group Save Ourselves Movement for Justice and Democracy held a press conference yesterday calling for the removal of the statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims. 
 
 The statue honors Sims as the "father of modern gynecology". In his research, Sims conducted experimental surgery without anesthesia on enslaved African-American women. Those treatments led to the basis of modern vaginal surgery. 
 
 A local activist was arrested last month on criminal trespassing charges after performing a skit in front of the statue on Confederate Memorial Day. 
 
 Also last month, New York City officials relocated a statue of Sims from Central Park to the cemetery where Sims is buried. ||||| It only took two bottles of ketchup to land Jon Broadway in jail. 
 
 Broadway, a 74-year-old Montgomery native, had never been behind bars before. 
 
 But by the end of the day on April 23, he would emerge from the Montgomery County Jail in his underwear, charged with criminal tampering for getting ketchup on the monument to a gynecologist who advanced medicine by experimenting on slave women. 
 
 What happened that day, as police intervened in the wake of protest skit, marks yet another strange chapter in the national debate over Confederate monuments and which parts of history deserve to be preserved. 
 
 It all started on Confederate Memorial Day, celebrated this year on April 23. Alabama is one of two states that recognizes it as an official holiday. (State offices also close on Jefferson Davis' birthday in June.) 
 
 That morning, Broadway arrived early to the grounds of the Alabama State Capitol. He and a fellow activist planned to perform a skit in front of a statue of 19th Century gynecologist J. Marion Sims. 
 
 They weren't sure who was going to show up to watch, but they wanted to finish before the main Confederate Memorial Day festivities began around 9:30. 
 
 Broadway, a Navy veteran and retired environmental engineer, is part of a loosely-connected group of Montgomery citizens who want to generate discussion on racial issues. 
 
 "How do you get white people to acknowledge there are deep (racial) wounds that have not been addressed?" said Broadway, who is white. "The Sims issue is an example of the kind of thing that needs to be discussed." 
 
 J. Marion Sims is best known as the "father of modern gynecology," credited for inventing the vaginal speculum and developing a surgical technique for correcting a devastating complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. 
 
 But Sims has been a lightning rod for controversy, particularly in recent years. 
 
 He perfected his techniques by experimenting on black slave women, without the use of anesthesia, in Montgomery in the 1840s. Three of those women were named Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey; the others' names are lost to history. 
 
 Sims performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone. 
 
 His defenders, including physician and scholar L.Lewis Wall, have said Sims followed social norms of the time and that his work ultimately improved the lives of the women whose fistulas he corrected, including slave women. 
 
 But there is no record of whether Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy consented to the surgeries, or what they thought about them. Their consent wasn't required; just that of their owners. 
 
 Monument debate 
 
 A statue of Sims used to sit in New York City's Central Park, across from the New York Academy of Medicine. In early April, city officials relocated it to the Brooklyn cemetery where Sims is buried, and there are plans to add a plaque explaining the statue's history. 
 
 But in Alabama, a relatively new state law prevents the removal of Sims' statue. 
 
 The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017 prohibits local governments from moving historical monuments on public property that have been in place 40 years or more. Removal requires approval from a committee. Breaking the law can result in a $25,000 fine. 
 
 It's still a popular issue in Alabama politics. Gov. Kay Ivey put it front-and-center in one of her campaign ads last month, saying outsiders "should not instruct Alabama on what it should do with historical monuments." Birmingham city went so far as to erect a wooden barrier around a Confederate monument in one of its downtown parks, as the city was not allowed to tear it down. 
 
 Alabama's statue of J. Marion Sims is not obscured. It sits beneath the branches of a magnolia tree, across the Capitol lawn from the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. 
 
 Sims himself never fought in the Civil War; he moved to Europe during those years. 
 
 AL.com has not been able to find an organization that has stepped forward to publicly defend the Sims statue. It does not have any direct connection to the Confederate cause. 
 
 Doctor and slave 
 
 The morning of Confederate Memorial Day, Broadway said around 15 people gathered at the statue to watch his skit. He had dressed in green surgical scrubs splattered with ketchup, to represent blood, and gave a monologue as J. Marion Sims. 
 
 Beside him was a woman who is black and was dressed as a slave, portraying one of the women on whom Sims had operated. Her costume was also splattered with ketchup. (The woman later avoided arrest and Broadway declined to give out her name until she chooses whether to speak publicly about the incident.) 
 
 Ketchup was smeared on the pedestal of the statue behind them. 
 
 The skit lasted around 8 minutes, during which Broadway and the woman both spoke. 
 
 "(Sims) was a butcher. He didn't try to save black babies; he just used us like guinea pigs," the woman said near the end of the skit, in the video, as she rubbed ketchup on the base of the statue. "Know your history. This statue needs to be removed." 
 
 Broadway said he'd seen some police in the area but they left the group alone during the skit. 
 
 'A wet, red substance' 
 
 After the skit was over, Broadway said he was standing around talking with a handful of spectators when they saw a large number of law enforcement headed toward them. He estimated there may have been 15-20 officers. 
 
 According to court records, Lt. Philip Taylor and Cpl. Nathan Mills of the state police had noticed "a wet red substance" on Broadway's green scrubs and on the woman's costume as they were leaving the area of the Sims statue. The woman left in her car before they could approach her. 
 
 According to their affidavit, Taylor and Mills "noticed a strong odor of vinegar and saw that the front of the statue was cover(ed) in a wet red substance." 
 
 They then went to the front of the Capitol building to stop Broadway from driving away. 
 
 They asked him why he was there and what the purpose of the skit was, Broadway said. He said the interaction with the officers had been cordial, but "at some point there was a tone change." 
 
 According to the affidavit, the officers asked what was on Broadway's clothes and on the statue, and he told them it was ketchup. 
 
 "Cpl. Mills asked how the ketchup got all over the front of the statue, and Mr. Broadway stated he put it there," said the affidavit. The Capitol Building Manager was called to wash off the ketchup. 
 
 The affidavit ends: "It is unknown at the time of signing this warrant any amount of damage caused by this substance." 
 
 Long johns 
 
 Broadway was cuffed and taken to the county jail where he was booked and placed in a holding cell. He was charged with criminal tampering, a class B misdemeanor. 
 
 He spent about eight hours in jail until his wife was able to secure a bonding company to post the $500 bond for his release. 
 
 A jail employee handed him the plastic bag containing his personal effects. When he went into a dressing room to change back into the scrubs he'd been wearing when he was arrested, he realized they weren't in the bag. 
 
 "I asked where they were," he said, "and they said, 'We need those for evidence.'" 
 
 A jail spokesperson confirmed that the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency confiscated the scrubs. 
 
 Broadway said he asked for a robe or some other covering, but said the person at the desk denied him extra clothes. 
 
 Broadway left the jail, clad in his long john underwear. 
 
 'An uncomfortable truth' 
 
 Broadway's trial is scheduled for September. The deputy district attorney prosecuting the case, Sean McTear,said he could not comment on a pending case. 
 
 Sen. Hank Sanders of Selma held a press conference a few weeks after the incident and called for the removal of the Sims statue. He helps lead a group called the Save OurSelves Movement for Justice and Democracy. 
 
 Sanders said Broadway displayed "courage and fortitude" to show how "damaging" it is to have a statue on the Capitol lawn that celebrates someone with a history like Sims'. 
 
 "You can't wait for folks to be ready" to hear an uncomfortable truth, he said. 
 
 AL.com contacted Save Our South, a group dedicated to preserving "Southern heritage and historical monuments across the United States" and which has previously sued to keep a Confederate soldiers monument in Birmingham from being taken down. 
 
 "While a museum would be an ideal place for many of these statues and monuments, removal of any such artifact that would cause irreparable damage is not condoned," said a spokesperson for Save Our South in a statement. 
 
 For his part, Broadway is not concerned so much with the Sims statue specifically as he is about getting white and black people across the state to have difficult conversations about race and their shared history. 
 
 "Black people see (our history) completely differently and that is something white society hasn't a clue about and hasn't tried to get a clue," he said.
– The "father of modern gynecology" is a man some people would now prefer to forget—but police in Alabama still won't let you smear ketchup on his statue. A 74-year-old activist was arrested on Confederate Memorial Day—that's April 23—for "criminal tampering" after leaving the condiment on a monument to 19th-century doctor J. Marion Sims, who experimented on enslaved women without anesthesia, AL.com reports. Jon Broadway performed a skit in front of the statue with a black woman who played the role of one of Sims' patients; the ketchup was a stand-in for blood. Sims "was a butcher. He didn't try to save black babies, he just used us like guinea pigs," the woman says in the skit. It's not clear whether the women Sims experimented on consented to the surgery. Broadway, who played Sims in the skit, is part of a group of Montgomery citizens who want to spark discussion of racial issues. "How do you get white people to acknowledge there are deep wounds that have not been addressed?" he says. He spent eight hours in jail after the arrest—and had to leave in his long johns because the ketchup-splattered scrubs he had been wearing were confiscated as evidence. Broadway has a September trial date. Alabama Public Radio reports that activists want Sims' statue removed from the grounds of the Alabama Capitol, but removal is blocked under a 2017 state law requiring a committee to approve the relocation of monuments that have been in public places for more than 40 years. (The statue of Sims in New York's Central Park came down last month.)