Tag: Confederate Park

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News The Fly-By

Confederate Heritage Groups Vow to Fight Park Name Changes

CREDIT: Toby Sells

They are still fighting the war. 

Not the “War Between the States” or the “War for Southern Independence,” as they call it, but local Confederate heritage groups say they will continue to fight the new names of three Memphis parks. 

The Memphis City Council approved a resolution in February 2013 to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest Park to Health Sciences Park, Jefferson Davis Park to Mississippi River Park, and Confederate Park to Memphis Park. 

Some residents and a group called Citizens to Save Our Parks (CSOP) filed a lawsuit in May 2013 to block the new names. A judge dismissed the suit in August saying the group had no legal standing to sue. 

Toby Sells

An old-time band plays some Confederate favorites during Saturday’s rededication of the Jefferson Davis statue.

But CSOP vowed to fight on. On Facebook, the group said it had filed an appeal, noting “this isn’t over.” They’ve launched a fund-raiser for the effort, a one-man show “Beyond Glory” that will be staged at the Orpheum Theatre next month.

Confederate heritage groups gathered in Memphis Park on Saturday to rededicate the park’s statue of Jefferson Davis on the 50th anniversary of its first dedication in 1964. Some of the men wore period clothing. Some of the women wore big hats and white gloves. Confederate flags were prominent on pins, neckties, and in a flower arrangement. The flag was also part of a parade of flags that stood next to the American flag, the Tennessee flag, and the Christian flag. 

Mark Buchanan is the commander of the Memphis Brigade of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and president of CSOP. He said many people — even supporters — question why they continue to fight the new names. 

“It’s in our DNA. It’s part of our faith. It’s part of our nation,” Buchanan said. “To try to erase our past is to deny who we are as Americans. It’s simply and undeniably who we are. Good, bad, happy, or sad, we can’t change it. We shouldn’t ignore it and we shouldn’t erase it.”

The day was rife with subtle jabs at the decision to rename the parks and to those behind the decision. Lee Millar, president of the General Forest Historical Society, held up the group’s permit for the event, which, he said, was labeled “Confederate Park.” The realization was met with a “here, here!” from the crowd.

“The park service still recognizes this as the correct park,” Millar said. “Unfortunately, it’s other people in the city, like the permit office, who are getting instructions from above, and I don’t mean ‘that’ above. They are trying to call it something else.”

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell named Saturday, October 18th “Jefferson Davis Day,” in a signed proclamation from his office. Luttrell did not appear at the gathering but Millar said Luttrell is a “great and devoted proponent of American history, particularly ‘our’ history.” Luttrell’s proclamation called Davis a “great leader” and he “established an example of greatness for future generation through his leadership and public service.”

After his defeat in the Civil War, Davis lived in Memphis and was president of a short-lived life insurance company.

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Opinion

A Short History of the Jefferson Davis Statue in Confederate Park

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The statue of Jefferson Davis was erected in Confederate Park in downtown Memphis in 1964, more than half a century after the more famous equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on Union Avenue. How and why? I wondered in light of the ongoing controversy over Confederate-named parks. What’s in a name?

Honorary names are something of a Memphis specialty. I drove from my house to “Frances Crain” (N. Avalon) to “Sally Wallace Hook Parkway” better known as East Parkway to the McWherter Library (a nod to former governor Ned) at University of Memphis and the Special Collections department on the fourth floor, where curator Ed Frank kindly pulled the Memphis Press-Scimitar newspaper clippings on Jefferson Davis and his statue.

The statue story is an interesting little yarn. Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, lived in Memphis from 1875 to 1878. The drive to honor the “forgotten man” with “a magnificent bronze statue” began in 1956, although the concept was approved by political boss E. H. Crump before he died in 1954. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, later assisted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, were the driving force. The first donation was $26. City officials blessed the project in 1962, when only $1,138 had been raised, but they changed the location from Jefferson Davis Park on Riverside Drive to Confederate Park on the bluff. It took eight years to raise the $17,473 needed for the eight-foot statue and 11-foot pedestal. These were not the days when wealthy benefactors simply wrote a check as they do today.

“This is a matter of pride for Memphis,” said Mrs. Harry Allen (as the newspaper referred to women), leader of the fund drive. “Memphis is the only major city in the South that does not have a statue of this great man.”

The Press-Scimitar dutifully reported the progress of the fund drive from 1956-1964. The unveiling seems not to have been tied to any Civil War centennial observation, and if it drew any public protest it was not noted by the afternoon newspaper which, of course, was produced and written by white men. (The Commercial Appeal’s archives are not part of the UM collection).

This was probably because Memphians, black and white, had bigger things to worry about than statues and symbolism. City schools were desegregated in 1961. Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking to tens of thousands in Washington D.C. and millions on television. The temper of the times can be felt by reading the front pages of The Commercial Appeal, gathered in a fine collection and coffee table book in 1991 on its 150th birthday. From 1962: “Two Men Are Dead in Campus Rioting After Meredith Is Escorted to Dormitory; Soldiers Try to Restore Order at Ole Miss.” From 1963: “Sniper Assassinates Kennedy in Dallas.” From 1964: “Three Bodies Found by FBI Believed Rights Workers.”

In 1968, the Press-Scimitar reported that “Negro” Aaron Henry of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the state NAACP president, protested the closing of state offices on the anniversary of Davis’s birth. Henry said Davis’s “only claim to infamy was based on his philosophy of human enslavement of black people by white people.” In 1970, the paper reported that Memphis Sesquicentennial Inc. planned to honor both Davis and Robert R. Church Sr., “South’s First Negro Millionaire.” The Davis statue was lighted. Church got a plaque and a park named for him at Beale and Fourth. The “one of you one of us” process continues to this day.

Davis, stripped of his rights after the Civil War, died in 1889. He was gone but not forgotten. His birthday, July 3rd, was a legal holiday in Mississippi and ten other states and known as the Confederate Memorial Day. The exact name, number, and dates of such observances today is a morass into which I do not plan fall. Suffice it to say that Davis’ rights were officially restored in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, a Southerner.

“Our nation needs to clear away the guilts and emnities and recriminations of the past, to finally set at rest the divisions that threatened to destroy our nation,” Carter said.

This week the City Council, provoked by state lawmakers in Nashville, voted to rename Confederate Park, Jefferson Davis Park, and Nathan Bedford Forrest Park with placeholder names until a committee can come up with permanent ones.

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Opinion

Confederate Parks: “It’s Done” but It’s Not Over

Forrest

  • Forrest

Could there be a more fiendishly designed story than Confederate parks and General Nathan Bedford Forrest to insure that Memphis forever trips over its own feet (well, maybe the Ford family saga)?

As City Councilman Lee Harris said, “It’s done” as far as renaming the parks. But it’s not over. This story has legs, as we say in the news biz. It also has horses, troops, and a cavalry. There are editorial revisions yet to come for the generic placeholder names, assuming a panel can be assembled that will agree on anything. But the real secret to the longevity of this story is no secret at all. It embraces the themes of race that Memphis loves so well.

If Forrest were alive today he would be coaching football at the University of Alabama. He would have figured out a way to beat Texas A&M, and he would be the darling of ESPN and the bane of reporters if he could not have them all flogged. As my colleague Chris Herrington says, a lot of people ignore the cause and confuse “war hero” with “great general”. Forrest is a war hero to unreconstructed white southerners like the ones writer Tony Horwitz described in his book “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.” He is an annoyance or worse to black Memphians for his ties to Fort Pillow and the Ku Klux Klan.

Shelby Foote, the great Memphis Civil War historian and author, wrote a lot about Forrest in Part Three of his trilogy. Forrest, who was in overall command at Fort Pillow, “was widely accused of having committed the atrocity of the war. ‘The Fort Pillow Massacre,’ it was called, then and thereafter, in the North.” Foote wrote that, in fact, Forrest “had done and was doing all he could to end it, having ordered the firing stopped as soon as he saw his troopers swarm into the fort, even though its flag was still flying and a good part of the garrison was still trying to get away.”

Foote died in 2005, shortly before the last (as in last one before this one) Forrest fight was staged. He opposed renaming Forrest Park as well as Confederate Park and Jefferson Davis Park. The statue of Jefferson Davis in Confederate Park (yes) was placed there in 1964 during the heat of the civil rights era and desegregation, the year after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington and the year three civil rights workers were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. It is impossible to imagine that its backers were not aware of the context. The Davis statue is more a political statement of those times than a monument to the Civil War. Davis could be in greater danger than Forrest.

If Nathan Bedford Forrest Park was on a less prominent street than Union Avenue, or if the general’s grave had not been moved in 1905 from Elmwood Cemetery where he was originally buried, the general would not get so much attention. But the park, with its equestrian statue of Forrest, is in the heart of the downtown medical center shared by the University of Tennessee and Baptist and Methodist hospitals that is finally showing renewed signs of life and investment. The Forrest grave site is a perfect spot for his admirers, whatever their motives, to put a thumb in the eye of the general’s critics, especially if they happen to be black.

Moving the monument and the graves of Forrest and his wife back to Elmwood, as some have suggested, would be one of the great media events of our time. Reenactors in full uniform would line the streets every foot of the way. Counter-demonstrators would turn out in equal or greater numbers. And every national news report would herald “Memphis Relives The Civil War.”

The City Council will revisit the issue soon. Councilman Myron Lowery has suggested adding a statue of Ida B. Wells to the park, a sort of one-of-ours-and-one-of-yours compromise. The problem with that is that some Memphians may not wish to identify with either one. If you are white, was Forrest “ours”? He belongs to history. His monument and grave have been there for 108 years. Moving them would make the annual Shiloh reenactment in April look like a church picnic. Union Avenue between Manassas and Cleveland is prime real estate that, hopefully, will one day look more like a medical center on the order of Nashville or Jackson, Mississippi. It’s complicated, fiendishly complicated. And not over by a long shot.