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‘Just a Park’

Millar, Turner, and Taylor at Health Sciences Park (Photo: Jackson Baker)

In the wake of a previous circumstance of tenseness and hostility at Health Sciences Park involving the disinterment of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Ann Montgomery Forrest, a press conference at the park on Friday, June 11th, was at least partly designed to clear the air, and to a large extent it may have.

The three principal speakers at last Friday’s press conference were County Commissioner and NAACP leader Van Turner of Greenspace, the nonprofit which now controls the large tract formerly known as Forrest Park; Lee Millar, president of the Memphis branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; and Brent Taylor, a longtime public official and the local funeral director who satisfied the state requirement for a technical advisor regarding the disinterment of the Forrests, destined now for a new gravesite at a Middle Tennessee site honoring Confederate history.

As Turner expressed it, “Hopefully, all sides were satisfied” — meaning the Black Memphians for whom the removal of the graves and monument meant a “full circle” expungement of former injustice and disregard as well as those whites who equated Confederate General Forrest with glory and their heritage. “I think the Forrest family wanted their ancestor to lie in peace, and there was never going to be any peace here,” Turner said.

Millar attested to the friendly cooperation and a general meeting-of-the-minds between himself and Turner, and Taylor, who saw himself as situated “in the middle” between communities, agreed that “all sides are happy with where we are. Both communities believe that we did this right.”

Asked what the future disposition of the park might be, Turner said he’d received “many recommendations,” but “Right now, we just want this to be a park, not to have any more symbolism here for a little while. We’d like people to just enjoy the park”

• Ellen Hobbs Lyle, the Nashville chancellor who ruled in favor of expanding mail-in voting last year at the height of the pandemic and subsequently incurred the wrath of the state Republican establishment, said last week that she wouldn’t seek another eight-year term in 2022. The suit that she ruled on was pressed by the ACLU and by a group of Memphis petitioners, and Lyle’s ruling was stoutly resisted by the state’s election authorities, who managed to get its scope reduced somewhat in an appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Subsequently, measures to punish Lyle were pushed by GOP legislators in the general assembly but were rejected.

• Governor Bill Lee announced last week that his administration would go ahead with a 37-mile wastewater pipeline connecting the still dormant Haywood County industrial megasite to the Mississippi River. Construction of the $52 million project could begin in the first quarter of 2022.

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Appeals Court Sides With City in Confederate Statue Suit

Minutes before Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue was removed from Health Sciences Park

The Tennessee Court of Appeals upheld a decision made by Davidson County Chancery Court denying the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) a temporary injunction against the city of Memphis for removing Confederate statues from formerly city-owned parks.

The SCV sought a temporary injunction in 2018 to preserve two Memphis parks that were the home of three Confederate monuments, until they were removed in 2017.

Last year, the Davidson County Chancery Court determined that the monuments were no longer on public property and therefore were not covered under the Tennessee Historical Protection Act (THPA) of 2013.

In a decision filed Tuesday, Judge Frank Clement Jr. upheld that ruling, saying that SCV cannot seek an injunction because the Forrest statue is no longer on public property and “thus was no longer a memorial whose status could be preserved.”

“Thus, our purpose is not to address the merits of SCV’s underlying claim or whether, in an enforcement action, the trial court might have jurisdiction under the THPA to enjoin a private entity from further disposing of memorials or issue a mandatory injunction to restore memorials already removed,” Clement wrote. “Rather, we are called upon to decide whether the trial court erred in denying SCV’s request for a preliminary injunction.

“We affirm the trial court’s judgment and dissolve the trial court’s stay of its decision pending this appeal.”

The THPA prohibits removing any monuments or memorials in public spaces without being granted a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC).

The city sought a waiver in 2017, but the THC denied it. The THPA doesn’t prohibit the city from selling the parks to a private entity, which the city did in December 2017.

The same night that the city sold the two parks containing statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, as well as a bust of James Harvey Mathes, to the nonprofit Memphis Greenspace for $1,000 each, the city removed the statues.

Members of the SCV could now take the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

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Greenspace Looks to Recreate Parks Formerly Home to Confederate Statues

CREDIT: Downtown Memphis Commission

Former view of Memphis Park

Memphis Greenspace, the nonprofit that bought two Downtown parks and removed the Confederate statues from them last year, is now looking to activate and reinvent the spaces.

After additional Confederate memorabilia was removed from Memphis Park last weekend, Van Turner, director and president of Greenspace, said there are no longer any impediments in the park.

“Let’s recreate the parks and put there what people want,” Turner said. “The slate is clean.”

Over the weekend, proof of the clean slate was evident in Memphis Park, as it housed the city’s inaugural Dîner en Blanc, a pop-up dinner party established in Paris in the late ’80s.

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Penelope Huston, vice president of marketing at the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC), one of Greenspace’s community partners, said 1,175 people attended the dinner and with the Confederate memorabilia still in the park that type of event “would not have been possible.”

When the organizer of the pop-up dinner came to Memphis looking for an event venue, Huston said “there was no place she wanted to be more” after learning about the history of Memphis Park.

Downtown Memphis Commission

Memphis’ inaugural Dîner en Blanc

“It made sense to help wipe the slate clean,” Huston said.

In an average week, the park also brings in more than 200 people for DMC-sponsored yoga and pilates classes.

“All this is bringing in thousands of people who haven’t experienced that park before who are now coming into Downtown and engaging with the parks,” Huston said. “Those numbers are important because they would have all been zero before.”

However, things are moving slower in Health Sciences Park where Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife are still buried.

Turner said he hopes that the litigation surrounding the graves and markers will wrap up by the end of the year.

There has already been efforts to do programming in Health Sciences Park, Huston said, but there hasn’t been a lot of community engagement. “We haven’t given up, though.”

Huston said the challenge is getting people back into parks where they previously hadn’t felt welcomed.


“Because people have been out of those spaces for a while, they have to be trained to come back in,” Huston said.

Still, Turner said there is a lot of potential at both park and that Greenspace is working with its community partners — the DMC, Memphis Medical District Collaborative, Memphis River Parks Partnership, Memphis Bloom, and UT Health Sciences — to further activate the parks.

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The nonprofit is also open to suggestions about what should be implemented in the parks, Turner said. Feedback can be submitted on the Greenspace website.

Pop-up playgrounds, more seating, and art installations are all possibilities for the future, he said.

As far as memorializing any one person in the parks, which was an idea floated around by activists after the statues were removed, Turner said he thinks they should be temporary, rotating every several months.

“From a creative standpoint, we don’t want to be stuck in the mud, stuck in history, and get caught flat-footed again,” Turner said. “We want the park to be living, breathing, and fluid, while being able to change and reinvent itself.”

Turner said that’s the direction the city should go in as well, as “Memphis needs to reinvent itself and not be stuck in the past.”

“We need to constantly be evolving and reinterpreting what is already here,” Turner said. “That’s how you grow and how you keep people coming back.”