Thoughts on a klansman
Last month, as but one marker of the sudden and somewhat unexpected public outcry to remove from all manner of public life flags and memorials honoring the Confederacy, the Memphis City Council voted unanimously to reverse a decision made by their forebears 110 years ago.
The council determined that Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, will remove the memorial to Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest that stands currently in the city’s Health Sciences Park (known, until 2013, as Forrest Park) and return the remains of Forrest and his wife, which are contained in the statue’s base, to Elmwood Cemetery, where they originally were laid to rest 140 years ago.
Many Americans might recognize Forrest’s name from the brief reference to him at the beginning of the film “Forrest Gump.” He otherwise is not today the household name that his contemporaries Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson have remained. As a military tactician, he may well have been their superior.
He also was a prosperous slave trader, committed atrocities during the war that today we would consider war crimes and, in the war’s aftermath, became the first-ever grand wizard of the terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan.
The council may have been unanimous in their decision, but the broader community of the American South has not been. Within two weeks of the vote, Council Chairman Myron Lowery reported that he’d already received 500 emails on the subject, estimating that “98 percent of [them were] from Forrest’s supporters…living outside of Memphis.”
Tensions have heightened somewhat as plans to remove the memorial move forward, but there is no question that it is going to happen. Earlier this week, the memorial was vandalized, with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” spray-painted on its base. Just yesterday, Thomas Robb – national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan – announced his offer to pay to transport Forrest’s remains to Boone County, Ark., to be buried near Robb’s Christian Revival Center, where he serves as pastor. Perhaps that would be appropriate.
I have lived in “The South” for more than a decade now – first, in Virginia and now, in Florida. But I am not a Southerner. I was raised in the North. My mother is an immigrant and my ancestry in this country on my father’s side does not extend beyond the early 20th century. Just as I cannot, as a white person, truly understand what it is to be confronted by symbols of slavery and white supremacy, nor can I say I know what it is to look at the rebel flag or Confederate memorials and regard them as symbols of “heritage.”
What I can imagine is that, after decades of a culture war consisting of occasional skirmishes punctuated by long periods of stasis, for those whose perspective on Confederate pride is markedly different from my own, the massive shift in public attitudes we’ve seen in recent months and weeks is almost certainly both dizzying and stupefying. Just a decade ago, an earlier measure proposing to rename Forrest Park and remove the memorial was passed narrowly by the Memphis City Council but vetoed by Willie Herenton, the city’s first black mayor. It seemed, for a long time, that’s the way things would remain.
That’s not how things have gone, and all indications are that’s not how things will go in the near future. The flags are coming down. The memorials are being decommissioned. The rallying cry of “heritage” – for so long, given deference as a serious stance for serious people to take in serious public debates– has been, overnight, rendered laughable, a pathetic justification for an impermissible attitude.
By and large, these are developments I cheer. I think symbols matter. I think history matters. I think we as Americans are long overdue for a genuine reckoning with our past, with what it says about us today, with how it shapes the directions we may head tomorrow.
My concern is that the speed with which we are disposing of these relics does not actually permit that kind of reckoning. Confronting the past, after all, must include remembering why the memorials and the monuments were created to begin with. It was not, as some would have it, simply to honor the sons of a nation that went to war and fought for a losing cause. It was, almost universally, to perpetuate a system of continuing terrorism against American citizens, a system which conspired for more than a century after slavery to deny them basic rights to assemble, to buy property, to vote and to enjoy police protection and equal treatment under the law.
The line between erasing misplaced honor and erasing history itself can be awfully thin. In our haste to correct past sins, we might just obliterate it. I have a side in the cultural debate, and I think my side is certainly right, but the debate itself also matters. Take down the memorials, where it is appropriate, but remember that they were there and why they were erected in the first place.
I’ll give the last word on the matter to Nate DeMeo, creator of the amazing podcast The Memory Palace. His most recent episode is about the Forrest memorial, and consists largely of him proposing a plaque that should be placed alongside the statue, wherever it ultimately ends up. The whole story is only about ten minutes long, and absolutely is worth hearing in its entirety, but I’d just like to include his conclusion here:
Maybe it should just say – maybe they should all say, the many, many thousands of Confederate memorials and monuments and markers – that the men who fought and died for the CSA – whatever their personal reasons, whatever was in their hearts – did so on behalf of a government formed for the express purpose of ensuring that men and women and children can be bought and sold and destroyed at will. Maybe that should be enough.
But I want people to know about those Memphians in 1905, who wanted people to remember Forrest and why, who wanted a symbol to hold up and revere, to stand for what they valued most. I want people to know that statute stood in downtown Memphis for 110 years. And to remember that memorials aren’t memories; they have motives. They are historical; they are not history itself.
And I want them to know why it was moved. That in 2015, after Clementa Pinckney and Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Tywanza Sanders and Ethel Lance and Susie Jackson and Cynthia Hurd and Myra Thompson and Daniel Simmons Sr. and Depayne Middleton-Doctor were murdered in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, there were people in Memphis who were done with symbols…and ready to bury Nathan Bedford Forrest for good.
