Tag: Memphis confederate statues

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Opinion Viewpoint

It’s High Time Larry Finch was Immortalized in Bronze.

The year 2017 will forever be a significant year in Memphis history for a pair of statues that came down. Let’s make 2018 (or at least 2019) a significant year for a statue we erect.

I’ve been campaigning for years now to see Larry Finch in bronze, a larger-than-life Memphian we lost too soon. (Finch died in 2011 at age 60 after being confined to a wheelchair for almost a decade following a stroke.) After years of uncomfortable and divisive debate about statues that represent a form of history to some and racial oppression to most, let’s make Memphis better by saluting one of this city’s great unifiers with the ultimate, perpetual tribute.

Larry Finch’s credentials for such an honor? After starring at Melrose High School, Finch chose to play basketball for his hometown college, then known as Memphis State University. This was not a blue-chip recruit choosing to join a winner. Memphis State finished the 1968-69 season (Finch’s senior year at Melrose) 6-19, the previous season 8-17. But Finch and his Melrose running mate, Ronnie Robinson, felt they could transform a program. And with the arrival of coach Gene Bartow for Finch’s sophomore season — his first playing for the varsity, as freshmen were not then eligible to play — a program was indeed transformed.

Larry Finch

Having gone 6-20 without Finch in 1969-70, the Tigers finished 18-8 in 1970-71, made the NIT with a 21-7 record in 1971-72, then secured the status of legends by reaching the 1973 NCAA championship game. Finch finished his playing career with a school-record of 1,869 points. The only three men currently above him on the Tiger chart needed four years to pass Finch’s total. His career scoring average of 22.3 points per game remains a Memphis record, unlikely ever to be broken.

Finch was an assistant coach for the next Tiger team to reach the Final Four (1984-85), then coached his alma mater for 11 years, guiding the likes of Elliot Perry, Penny Hardaway, and Lorenzen Wright. He’s one of only two men to win 200 games at the Tiger helm and fell one victory short of a third Final Four in 1992.

Those are Finch’s credentials as a basketball player and coach. But he deserves a statue as much for the when of his life as the what. Finch had just completed his junior season in high school when Martin Luther King was killed at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. The ensuing years were ugly, divisive, and painful, TIME magazine going so far as to label Memphis “a decaying Mississippi River town.” Integration efforts felt forced, perhaps because they were. School busing proved to be a disastrous experiment.

Amid all the social discomfort, Larry Finch thrived. And a town without a major-league sports franchise found a team around which to rally, as one. Finch was as Memphis as the Mississippi River, and the life he brought this region is precisely the opposite of decaying.

How do we get Finch’s statue built? And where does it go? The plaza at FedExForum would be a great spot, though I’ve heard nonsensical protests: “Finch never played for the Grizzlies. He never played in FedExForum.” A statue of Cool Papa Bell stands today in front of Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and Bell never played in the major leagues, let alone for the Cardinals. Might the Grizzlies step up and spearhead this movement? They’d sell more tickets, not fewer, with a statue of Larry Finch in the background of fans’ pictures. (If not the FedExForum plaza, put the statue in front of the new Laurie-Walton Family Basketball Center, the palatial training facility for the program on the Park Avenue campus.)

As for how . . . contact your favorite Memphis booster. This remains a small town. Anyone remotely close to the Tiger program knows a booster with deep pockets. Surely enough could be collected to pay the right sculptor to bring Larry Finch (and his magnificent jump shot) to life once more. The handsome statue of blues legend Bobby “Blue” Bland that now stands on Main Street cost upwards of $50,000. This can be done. And it should be done. Memphis has cleared itself of imagery that divided for decades. Let’s create an image that will unify and inspire for decades to come.

Frank Murtaugh is managing editor of Memphis magazine.

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Editorial Opinion

Statue Removal Process Sets Wrong Precedent

Forrest and his wife still remain buried where the statue once stood

Dawn’s first light of 2018 found two empty pedestals where symbols of oppression once stood — and in their place, fresh concerns have grown about the method and processes that emptied them.

Officials at the highest levels of local government toiled in secret harmony over many months to devise the complicated plan that yielded the seamless choreography of the night the Confederate statues came down. The government process is most often likened to the ugly, blood-and-guts  process of making sausage, so anything seamless is an improvement.

The Memphis City Council publicly heard plans, options, legal opinions, and more for weeks, as the ordinance to remove the statues moved through the legislative and legal process. But in the end, council members unanimously approved a plan that was never vetted in a public hearing.

During the day of Tuesday, December 20th, government officials began enacting a process that was shielded from the public and the press. While council members went about their daily business at city hall, police readied to secure the parks for the statues’ removal. Contracts selling the parks to Greenspace Inc. had been proofed, finalized, and waited only for Mayor Jim Strickland’s signature.

When the time came, council member Edmund Ford Jr. brought a substitute ordinance to his colleagues. Surely every council member knew what the ordinance contained and surely each and every one of them had already agreed to it. Because they all approved the new rule without discussion. They didn’t read it aloud. They didn’t even offer up copies of it to the public after the vote. The public was left in the dark.

With the council vote in hand, Strickland quickly signed the sale documents. Police mobilized, possibly even before the ink had dried. Soon, blue lights flooded Health Sciences Park on Union Avenue and Memphis Park on Front Street.

We’ve been supportive of the removal of the Confederate statues numerous times in these pages, but we cannot support the new precedent for the city council to do whatever it wants without any public inspection or input.

What if the council had simply sold Overton Park’s Greensward to, say, the Memphis Zoo? The new precedent would have certainly streamlined that process, of which more than one council member complained.

Council member Kemp Conrad recently poked fun at the public’s mistrust of the city council. During a discussion of proposed changes to the city’s rules for permitting races, protests, and other public gatherings on WKNO’s Behind the Headlines, Conrad joked that “It’s not like [council member Reid Hedgepeth] is riding around in a black helicopter trying to figure out a way to quash free speech.”

But if you wonder why some Memphians don’t trust the council, look no further than the vote that brought those statues down.

Experts could argue, perhaps, that the method of the final vote was completely legal. And they may be correct. But is it the right way to govern?

We don’t think so. The public has every right to know what their council is voting upon. They earn that right every time they pay taxes and every time they pull the handle in a voting booth.

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News News Blog

City Council Makes Headway to Remove City’s Confederate Statues Regardless of Historical Commission’s October Decision

The Memphis City Council unanimously agreed Tuesday to sponsor an ordinance that allows the statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Health Sciences Park and Jefferson Davis in Memphis Park, as well as any related artifacts to be immediately removed from the City, even if the Tennessee Historical Commission denies the city’s waiver request in October.

Citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating equal access to public parks, council attorney Allan Wade told the council’s executive committee that the best way to legally remove the statues is to start an ordinance that establishes a city policy for the immediate removal of the Confederate monuments from public spaces.

This policy, he says, is based on the notion that the two statues, and artifacts like it on city-owned property “constitute a public nuisance,” which state law defines as anything that interferes with the public’s use enjoyment of the spaces.

Wade continues that the statues “potentially infringe upon the civl rights of the significant majority of the population of the city.”

Violating someone’s constitutional rights takes precedent over state laws, Wade says.

If you start with a Constitutional premise, he says, “there is no justifications for these statues to be there as an impediment to African Americans.”

If passed, the ordinance will not take effect until after the THC votes on the Forrest statue waiver at its October 13 meeting.

Wade says he wants to allow the THC to “do the right thing. If they don’t, then this ordinance says unleash the dogs.”

The final vote for the ordinance is set for October 3.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Circular Firing Squad

CREDIT: Featureflash | Dreamstime

It’s really hard to believe that the mayor of Memphis would denounce “outside agitators” and make a stand against activists wanting to take down the city’s confederate statues. I mean, how tone-deaf can you be?

I’m speaking, of course, of former Mayor Willie Herenton, who, in 2005, used that epithet to describe the Rev. Al Sharpton, who’d come to Memphis to support local activists who wanted to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis statues and rename the city parks where they stood.

Sharpton’s response to Herenton: “You need outside agitators when you don’t have enough inside agitators. Don’t get mad at us for doing your job.”

I think it’s safe to say Memphis now has a sufficiency of “inside agitators.” The persistent and vocal push to remove the Forrest and Davis statues has reached critical mass, having gained support from current Mayor Jim Strickland, the Memphis City Council, and even Governor Bill Haslam.

It’s been a long time coming. I did a little casual research on the Flyer website and noted that the paper has been reporting on and editorializing about this issue since at least the mid-1990s, when we first began putting our content online.

There have always been those who took a stand against the statues, but for years their voices were buried by bureaucracy and stymied by local politics and well-organized and well-funded opposition from confederate supporters. No more.

It seems inevitable now: The statues will come down in Memphis, as they are coming down all over the country. The devil is in the details and the timing.

We would not have gotten to this point if not for people willing to take a stand; people willing to make other people uncomfortable; people willing to confront the status quo. Through their persistence and courage — and the inadvertant “help” of those using confederate symbols in conjunction with acts of terrorism and murder — more and more people are coming to realize that too often it’s not “heritage” that’s being served by these symbols and monuments — it’s racism and tacit veneration of white supremacy and slavery. And more people are supporting the idea that decisions about such symbols should be made by local municipalities, and not subject to the whims of rural state legislators whose values are not those of most Memphians.

I think it’s important at this juncture that the disparate forces moving to make the statues come down do all they can to avoid the “circular firing squad.” The goal has been agreed to. The agenda is no longer in question. How and when we get there is what is still in dispute. But those with a mutual goal should avoid demonizing each other. That just muddies the water, weakens the process, and strengthens the opposition.

The mayor and the administration seem bent on taking the battle to court, challenging the Tennessee Historical Commission’s 2016 ruling against the city. Activists want more immediate measures taken — ceding the park land to private conservancies, for example, or just removing the statues and dealing with the legal consequences afterward.

It would help if, instead of attacking each other and creating more divisiveness between folks who have a common stated goal, the various contingents could work together to find mutual ground, say, agree upon a date by which the statues must come down, one way or another. A good target, in my opinion, would be March, 2018, at the latest — prior to the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in our city.

Let’s all agitate in the same direction. We’ll get there faster.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Into the Forrest

On June 20th, a few hundred people gathered at Bruce Elementary School to discuss strategies for taking down Memphis’ monuments to Confederate war heroes — specifically, the Jefferson Davis statue downtown and the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue near the University of Tennessee Memphis. The Memphis City Council has voted to remove the statues, but they have been stymied by a quickly enacted Tennessee law that forbids the removal of “war memorials” without state permission.

Forrest — the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan — and his wife were disinterred from Elmwood Cemetery and re-buried under an equestrian statue in center-city Memphis in the early 20th century. The Jefferson Davis statue was put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1964, after an eight-year fund drive which netted $17,483 — the cost of erecting the statue.

I learned this information from a 2013 column by former Flyer columnist John Branston, whose report also contained this excerpt from the Memphis Press-Scimitar: “This is a matter of pride for Memphis,” said Mrs. Harry Allen, leader of the fund drive. “Memphis is the only major city in the South that does not have a statue of this great man.”

That’s no longer the case. New Orleans recently took down its Confederate monuments. St. Louis is deconstructing its principal Confederate monument; it will be rebuilt and placed on private land. Arizona is considering removing its Civil War monuments from public land. All of that state’s several monuments were erected between 1943 and 2001.

Why does Arizona — which had a nominal connection to the Civil War — have a bunch of Confederate monuments? You tell me. I suspect it’s for the same reason you see Confederate flags flying in rural Pennsylvania and northern Missouri and central Idaho. Heritage.

Right.

Proponents for keeping the statues often say something along the lines of, “With all the problems the city of Memphis has, why are you people obsessed with taking down these statues?” To which I say, “With all of the problems the South has, why are you people so worried about keeping a few statues?”

The fact is, the South needs to rise again. The former states of the Confederacy lead the nation in divorce rates, teen pregnancy, opioid and meth addiction, poverty, sexually transmitted disease, suicide, and illiteracy. We suck up more federal funds than we contribute in taxes. In the face of these daunting problems, our state legislators spend their days obsessing over sex, gender, guns, tax breaks for their corporate benefactors and the wealthy, and instituting their neanderthal version of Christianity as the state religion.

So yes, we all have bigger issues than statues. But as relatively recent history has shown, putting up (and taking down) statues has more to do with the politics of the day than preserving heritage. Statues come and go based on the wishes of the majority and the vicissitudes of contemporary values. If the majority wants a statue taken down or put up, it will happen, eventually.

The biggest divide we’re dealing with in Tennessee is not over the Civil War. It’s rural interests and values versus urban issues and values. Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Memphis are pushing for more progressive policies in the areas of labor and wages, immigration, gender and racial discrimination, education, and gun control. The legislature, which is controlled by a rural Republican majority, is pushing back at every turn, taking away powers that should rightfully belong to the cities — including, but not limited to, deciding what kind of statues the majority of its citizens might want in their parks.

That battle will be difficult. In the meantime, we should take a cue from the folks in Cooper-Young who raised money earlier this month to put up a statue of Johnny Cash. The state can’t stop the citizens of Memphis from erecting statues, at least, not yet. So interested groups should do as the United Daughters of the Confederacy did: Start popping up statues congruent with our mostly non-commemorated heritage — Harriet Tubman, Maxine Smith, Benjamin Hooks. Lots of possibilities.

In the meantime, until they come down, I say we should just build walls around the Nathan B. Forrest and Jefferson Davis statues and charge admission, with the funds designated to the National Civil Rights Museum.