Tag: Nathan Bedford Forrest

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Forrest Bust Sparks Fiery Debate in House

CREDIT: Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home/Facebook

Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home/Facebook

Fiery debate sparked among members and guests of the Tennessee House Naming, Designating, and Private Acts committee Tuesday as they reviewed the possible removal of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the State Capitol Building.

Rep. Rick Staples (D-Knoxville) brought a resolution to the committee to remove the bust, “replacing it with tribute to a more deserving Tennessean.” Staples suggested replacing it with busts of Anne Davis, a Knoxville woman instrumental in winning federal designation for Smokey Mountains National Park, and of William Yardley, the first African American to run for Tennessee governor.

“There are a number of divisive topics on the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust,” Staples said. “My idea is to move past the conversations that divide us and have conversations about what could bring us together.”

Kristie Allen, general counsel for the Tennessee Capitol Commission, laid out the two-step process for the bust’s removal. The removal would first go to the Capitol Commission, a board comprised of several cabinet members, like the Secretary of State, comptroller, and Commissioner of Finance, for example.

If that board approves of the removal, it would, then, request a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission to step around the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act. That law says no statue or monument can be removed from public grounds without the commission’s approval. Memphis sidestepped this process in 2017 and removed the statue of Forrest from what is now called Health Sciences Park.

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

Staples’ resolution would not change much substantively. It would simply tell members of the deciding bodies of the House’s opinion on the bust and, perhaps, inform their decisions.

Rep. Mark Windle (D- Livingston) chaired the meeting Tuesday and noted that he asked members of the Tennessee Historical Commission to attend but “they declined to appear. They were invited and decided not to come.”
[pullquote-1] Without the board’s historical expertise, the committee heard, instead, from James Patterson, a Civil War re-enactor and state commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The Forrest bust should stay, he said, to help us remember the history of our past.”

“Monuments have not been a problem until about three years ago,” Patterson said. “(Attacks on the monuments) are now based on a false narrative and fake history, agitated by those with a radical agenda about the destruction of American history.”

Sons of Confederate Veterans state commander testifies to the House committee.

Patterson said members of the “Murfreesboro antifa” recently “doxxed” him, and made his personal information like his home address, phone number, and more public. The group called him and others “white supremacists” and it seemed some were trying “to get someone to attack us just because we like Tennessee history because it comes in through our blood.” Also, he recently received a letter saying, “leave town racist.” He said removing the bust would be “approving their bad behavior.”

Rep. John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville) said protests around the Forrest bust go back to at least 1978 and have continued since then. Patterson said those protests probably weren’t as rowdy as they have been recently. Clemmons said bullwhips were used and that there have been “overwhelming objection to the bust since 1978.”

The committee also heard from historian and former history professor Michael Bradley, who urged the committee to “apply the standard practices of history to the issues at hand.” That meant looking at evidence and proof.

In several instances, Bradley provided several accounts of where, he said, legend about Forrest had overshadowed facts. While Forrest was a slave trader, Bradley said a news story at the time that painted him as an abusive slave owner was likely “wartime propaganda” conceived by Abraham Lincoln’s administration.

Michael Bradley testifies to the House committee.

On founding the Ku Klux Klan, Bradley said no one has ever produced evidence that Forrest formed the group. He said a federal inquiry proved this and that legislators at the time “congratulated him on his efforts to suppress the Klan.”

On Fort Pillow, Bradley said there were some violations of the rules of war. However, he said the numbers were exaggerated. The midpoint of casualties, Bradley said, was about 185, not the 277 listed in state historical documents or in encyclopedias.

On this discrepancy, Rep. Jason Hodges (D-Clarksville) asked “how many people can you massacre and still be honored?” Bradley told him massacre was a “loaded” word and recalled that many called Forrest “the Butcher of Fort Pillow.”

“Oh, OK. How many people can I butcher before I’m honored by the state of Tennessee?” Hodges asked.

Bradley replied, “probably a large number” and pointed to Andrew Jackson’s removal and slaughter of Native Americans.

While many committee members debated Forrest’s merit and place of honor in the capitol building, Rep. Bo Mitchell (D-Nashville) was having none of it.

Crowds gathered in Health Sciences Park to support the removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue.

“I don’t want to honor anyone in this state that is guilty of something like,” Mitchell said. “Take me to Germany and show me anyone responsible for the atrocities of World War II and if there’s a state of them in Germany honoring them, I’ll shut up and say we should leave that bust up,” Mitchell said. “Things were done wrong in our history and we need to learn from them and move on, but let’s not act like nothing happened at Fort Pillow.”

The committee ultimately held the resolution for one week. Rep. Glen Casada (R-Franklin) said he had an amendment to the legislation that rotates busts of Tennesseans in and out of the capitol building. At the end of Tuesday’s debate, though, Staples had the last word.

“It is serendipitous and a thing of beauty that after such a hearty and controversial debate, that a descendant of slavery is now speaking,” Staples said. “An individual who was never thought to be here today, walked across the assembly floor of the House.

“(Tennsseans) are seeing us fight and be divisive and debate. I’m telling you today, this is not who we are. I know you. You know me. We know our families. We laugh. We talk. We make fun of one another. We know how to be respectful of one another.”
[pullquote-2] At the same committee meeting, Staples offered the committee a bill to designate August 8th as “Emancipation Day.“ The bill would would change the day from one of observance to a legal holiday. The distinction would allow some state employees to take the day off from work.

This, according to the legislature’s fiscal review committee, could cost the state up to $647,400 in the next fiscal year and each year afterward.

Staples said he’ll amend the bill to designate the day to the first Sunday before August 8th, removing any financial hit to the state budget.

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News News Blog

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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News News Blog

Pro-Confederate Protests Roll Through the City

White nationalist Billy Roper leading a verse of ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie’

Fewer than a dozen protesters rallying against the city’s recent removal of Confederate statues stood near Health Sciences Park sporting a banner that read “diversity = white genocide.”

They were led by self-proclaimed white nationalist, Billy Roper who told reporters that the reason for the protest was to bring attention to the city’s

December sale of Health Sciences and Memphis Park to the recently-formed nonprofit Memphis Greenspace, and then the swift removal of the Confederate statues from the parks that followed.

The goal, he said, is to provoke state legislatures to censure the city administration,

pursuing a lawsuit against what he said were actions done “surreptitiously and under darkness.”

Surrounding the protesters in a barricaded area near Union and Manassas were more than 30 police cars, dozens of officers, along with state reinforcement and city trucks blocking the entrance to the park.

Security screening on Union

Health Sciences Park, as well as Memphis Park were closed to the public on Saturday, as the city administration and the Memphis Police Department aimed to “keep the peace and ensure the safety of our citizens.”

The protest remained peaceful and no arrests were made.

Meanwhile, a non-associated caravan of close to 50 vehicles decorated with Confederate flags paraded around the I-240 loop, protesting the removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue and the “desecration” of his grave.

Below Roper speaks on his reasons for the Saturday protest.

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Opinion The Last Word

A Modest Proposal

CREDIT: © Palinchak | Dreamstime

Like most non-racist Memphians, I was disappointed but not surprised to hear we will not be getting the resolution we hoped for on the matter of a certain statue next week. The Tennessee Historical Commission will not be considering the city’s request to remove the divisive monument to Civil War loser and wizard of racism Nathan Bedford Forrest from the eastern gateway of our downtown for at least another four months.

The commission claims to be “working out the rules” for hearing the request and cannot make any legally binding decisions until that process is complete. They intend to vote on the rules at the October meeting, after which they will be submitted to the state attorney general and secretary of state. Something tells me they are in no hurry. The 29-member commission did not specify any details regarding the rules waiver applicants should expect to follow, but they apparently can unilaterally agree on one thing: They’re not reviewing any waivers anytime soon.

© Palinchak | Dreamstime

Hillary Clinton

I dunno, y’all. I think they might be stringing us along. It’s crazy — I was always taught that conservatives believed in sovereignty and minimizing government. Empowering an appointed commission to decide what cities can do with their land and property seems like a bit of an overreach. The Tennessee Heritage Protection Act was introduced by a Civil War reenactor in response to the renaming of three Memphis parks in 2013. It only mentions military conflicts — so statues honoring civil rights leaders, cultural visionaries, and important figures who are actually relevant to Tennessee’s history are not protected. As I long suspected, “heritage” is code. The law has one purpose. Taking the waiver route might be a … lost cause.

There are other options. The text of the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act stipulates monuments cannot be “relocated, removed, altered, renamed, rededicated, or otherwise disturbed” from public property. So the city can sell the property, right? Just tape off the perimeter around Mr. and Mrs. Nate Bed and auction the land to the highest bidder. The graves and the statue won’t be included in the deal, of course. Transfer funds, sign papers, shake hands, move the Forrests back to Elmwood Cemetery and the statue to a museum. Use the proceeds from the transaction to erect a nice monument to Martin Luther King Jr. for the 50th anniversary of his assassination.

Here’s another out-of-the-box idea I think will change some minds: Put a statue of Hillary Clinton in the park. A larger-than-life bronze statue of the former First Lady astride a unicorn, leaping over a mountain of emails. As secretary of state, Hillary was in the situation room when Osama bin Laden was captured during Operation Enduring Freedom. There’s your war connection. So the statue would be protected under the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act. And Health Sciences Park would be an ideal location to erect a monument to the woman who was instrumental in the passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which insured millions of American kids. Right?

As the first female major-party nominee for president, Hillary Clinton is a very important part of every American woman’s heritage. Eventually — hopefully in my lifetime — the United States will have a woman president who will thank her for paving her path in her election speech. Women and girls could walk past the statue every day and be inspired. And, you know what they say: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. So a Hillary statue is required to ensure the 2016 election never happens again. That’s how it works, right?

Just imagine the protests. Tiki torches everywhere. Wall-to-wall Fox News programming. Oh my goodness, the presidential tweetstorm. Oh, you want Hillary to go away? Sorry, she ain’t going anywhere! No, seriously. We would consider moving the statue, but the state legislature says we have to get this waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission, and it’s kind of an ordeal. Plus, you know, it just wouldn’t be fair to move her statue when we have this other statue of a guy who lost whose supporters would not “get over it.” You’re absolutely right, it’s not the same. Hillary is an ambitious grandma who wanted to be president but used her personal email for work stuff. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave dealer, a traitor, and a war criminal. Now, about that waiver …

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and digital marketing strategist.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Author of Heritage Protection Act Cautions City About ‘Consequences’

CREDIT: JB

JB

State Rep. Steve McDaniel

One day after the City Council agreed unanimously to adopt an ordinance allowing relocation of local statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis regardless of whether formal state ap
proval can be obtained, the author of the state’s Heritage Protection Act weighed in with words of caution.

“That’s against the law. They’d be prosecuted for felonies for destroying public property. Or if somebody vandalizes the property, they’d have to suffer the consequences,” said
State Rep. Steve McDaniel (R-Parkers Crossroads) in Memphis on Wednesday.

McDaniel was in town to address a Kiwanis luncheon at the University Club and discussed the matter of preserving Civil War history both during and after his remarks to the club. He made the statement about “consequences” when, in the course of an interview after his speech he was reminded that the Heritage Protection Act prescribes no specific penalties for violators of it.

“We did that on purpose,” said Rep. McDaniel, who also functions as Deputy Speaker of the state House of Representatives. In theory, there would be no need to prescribe specific penalties, he said. “We expected governments to follow the law. That’s why we have no penalties.”

But he repeated: “ If [people] don’t follow the law, then they have to suffer the consequences….We’re one of the few states that has a process through law that if you want to move or remove monuments, there’s a process to follow.”

McDaniel was clear about his own outlook. “I disagree with moving the statue. I fully support that statue staying here in Memphis at its current location. I think his and all the statues need to stay where they are.”

A longtime Civil War buff, McDaniel has been city manager of Parkers Crossroads since the Henderson County town was first incorporated in 1981.

That role also gives him direct supervision of the town’s major industry, the large and expanding park and museum area which sprawls on both sides of Interstate 40 at mile-marker 108 and commemorates the Battle of Parkers Crossroads.

The battle, which took place on December 31, 1862, was, as McDaniel explained to the Kiwanians, one of the first encounters which earned distinction for Confederate General Forrest, whom the legislator referred to wryly as “a man you see in the news sometimes now, especially in Memphis.”

Forrest, a commander of cavalry, was in the Parkers Crossroads area as part of a mission to harass Union forces in West Tennessee and to interdict the movement of troops and supplies via railroad. As McDaniel explained, he was surprised at Parkers Crossroads and flanked on both sides by separate Union Army contingents but escaped the potential trap by a bold decision to “charge ‘em both ways.”

McDaniel takes part in periodic reenactments of the Battle of Parkers Crossroads, but as a mere private, letting someone else play the part of Forrest. “I don’t want to be in charge of things,” he says.

He described Forrest as a “natural born military tactician,” who deserved recognition for his feats, though “he gets weighed down by other things.”

Among those “other things” are the fact that Forrest was a slave trader in Memphis before the war, was accused during the war of a massacre of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow, and was Grand Dragon of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan after the war.

McDaniel did not discuss those matters directly during his luncheon remarks, but in the interview afterward alluded to the last charge.

After repeating that Forrest was a “natural born military tactician” and suggesting that “people ought to focus on the positive,” McDaniel said, “This other activity that he got involved in, once he saw what was bad about it, he disbanded it….You can find something bad on anybody We wouldn’t agree with what he did after the war, but he did a lot of good things.”

McDaniel rushed one version of the Heritage Protection Act through the legislature in 2013 in an effort (too late as it turned out) to prevent the Memphis City Council from changing the names of three downtown parks with Confederate associations, including Forrest Park (now Health Sciences Park).

In 2016, he successfully sponsored a stronger version of the Act, mandating that a change in the status of monuments can only be approved by a two-thirds vote of the 29-member state Historical Association. The City of Memphis will seek a waiver from that body when the Association next meets in Nashville in October.

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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.

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Editorial Opinion

Monumental Democracy

Enormous amounts of rhetoric have been loosed, both locally and nationwide, regarding the monuments to confederate figures and confederate causes that were erected in years past, and action of some sort is sure to follow. Even before the unsettling recent disturbances involving a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, a circumstance that saw opportunistic Nazis on the march and the resulting tragic death of a counter-protester, these statuary homages to a lost cause had potential for serious divisiveness.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Recognizing that fact, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans had the foresight to remove the confederate monuments there. Baltimore has since dismantled its own, and, pending possible further action, Charlottesville has moved to cover up the statue of Lee and another of Stonewall Jackson. Other cities have done something similar, and, famously and urgently, Memphis has the ongoing quandary of what to do with its downtown statues to Nathan Bedford Forrest and confederate president Jefferson Davis.

The prospect for decisive action on the matter has mounted significantly of late, with Governor Bill Haslam joining city officials in calling upon the Tennessee Historical Commission to acquiesce in the statues’ removal, and the momentum is such that, one way or another, they could be gone even without such formal approval.

As it happens, Memphis is not just on the verge of abandoning an outmoded view of its history by junking one set of monuments, it also has the opportunity to refresh its horizons by erecting another set of memorials.

On Monday, the members of the Shelby County Commission voted unanimously to contribute significant funding to a memorial entitled Memphis Suffrage Monument: Equality Trailblazers, a permanent tribute in glass and bronze to Tennessee women who have loomed large in the expansion of voting rights.

This new memorial is to be a component of the Tennessee Womens Suffrage Trail, a statewide framework overseen by Memphian Paula Casey and Jacqueline Hellman, as well as of the Memphis Heritage Trail. It will also mark the 2020 Centennial of Tennessee’s decisive passage of the 19th Amendment for universal suffrage. It is the work of sculptor Alan Leguire, who has created other monuments to the suffrage movement and to women’s rights in Nashville, Knoxville, and Jackson.

The local memorial will be unveiled in August of 2018 in front of City Hall, and, on the way to the Suffrage Centennial, will also mesh with next year’s 50-year planned commemoration in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and with the 200th anniversary of the founding of Shelby County.

Plans are also afoot to create other monuments to equality in the general perimeter of the monument to the Equality Trailblazers, which will bear the busts of eight pioneers in the fight for, and exercise of, women’s suffrage — Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Lide Smith Meriwether, Lulu Reese, state Representative Joe Hanover, Charl Ormond Williams, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and state Representative Lois DeBerry, with additional tributes to Marion Griffin, Maxine Smith, and Minerva Johnican.

Monumental women, all of them.

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Editorial Opinion

Cometh the Change

Who, until weekend before last and Charlottesville, could have imagined a large contingent of neo-Nazis and their sympathizers marching en masse in public and claiming to speak on a subject of major national importance. That a gathering of progressive citizens rose up to resist them is only to be welcomed — even if those counter-demonstrators, as President Trump bent over backwards to contend, contained a militant element themselves.

The fact is that a term that was modish for a while in the ’60s and ’70s and then fell out of favor is likely due for a revival. “Participatory democracy” was how it went, and it denoted what was then a rising tide of direct action — demonstrations, marches, citizen interventions, and, in some cases, disruptions of both the planned and spontaneous kind — going on among masses of people who had not been elected to any sort of government.

There is an irony of sorts — or maybe an appropriateness — in the fact that, as our elected representatives in the Congress seem to have settled into a state of gridlock in which nothing (or at least nothing positive) can occur, citizens have taken to the streets to make things happen on their own.

The renewed demonstrations here locally at the site of the Nathan Bedford Forrest monument and grave and the new ones demanding the removal as well of the Jefferson Davis statue on the riverfront, are instances of an obvious sense of impatience and a developing shift in public behavior.

In Memphis, the issue is compounded by a state action taken expressly to counter the will of local government — namely, the Heritage Protection Act of 2016, which places all authority over monuments like those to Forrest and Davis in the hands of the state Historical Commission, which must approve changes in the status of the monuments by a two-thirds vote of its 20 members.

City government has already moved decisively to change the names of three downtown parks from prior appellations that paid homage to the confederacy, including the two parks with the offending statues. Mayor Jim Strickland and the City Council are on record as favoring the removal of those monuments. But the hands of city officials are tied — or seem to be — by the aforesaid state law. Those demanding immediate action point out, however, that the state law, which was rushed into being to prevent any change in the status of the Memphis monuments, lacks any penalty provisions.

Accused by some of the demonstrators as lacking in leadership, Strickland felt constrained to issue an angry rebuttal on his Facebook page, citing his prior actions on behalf of equality of all citizens and saying, “I want every Memphian to see the absurdity of someone accusing a mayor who is actually working on removing confederate statues as being an apologist for white supremacists.” The mayor cautioned against “an attempt to divide this city with the kind of racial politics that we should all reject.”

It is a warning well meant and well worth heeding. But there’s a corollary to it: that the times, they are once again a-changin’, and the order is, indeed, rapidly fading.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Protect the People

CREDIT: Susan Ellis

At 3 p.m. on Saturday, about 250 people gathered in Health Sciences Park around the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue.

“Whose city? Whose park?” went one chant.

“The people united will never be defeated,” went another.

Those in support of the statue weren’t overtly present, though there were some reported sightings. Perhaps it was the heat (heat index 105) that kept them at bay.

Protesters tried to drape the statue in a giant cloth banner and made some headway before the action was quashed by police.

One man yelled for the speakers to stop cussing. The response? “We’re here to take the motherfucking statue down!”

A second attempt at draping the statue led to arrests. Protesters surrounded the cop car to keep them from leaving. The car backed up, bumping into some people, which brought a brief but scary flash of Heather Heyer’s murder in Charlottesville. One woman began to sob.

And then another chant: “Protect the people, not the statue.”

At some point during the event, a call was put out for elected officials to come and speak. There was no response.

Meanwhile at the Crosstown Concourse, both Mayor Luttrell and Mayor Strickland were there for the grand opening of the $200 million project that Todd Richardson, one of the masterminds behind Crosstown, called a miracle.

That event drew between 10,000 and 13,000 people. There were two balloon drops. The balloons were green, black, and white.

The protesters at Health Sciences Park want the statues down, yes, but they also demanded equality across the board — in education, in transportation, in how they are treated by the cops.

Protect the people, not the statue.

• It appears as of now that Strickland is determined to follow the letter of the law in regards to the removal of the statues of Forrest and Jefferson Davis, but wouldn’t it be cool if tomorrow when when we woke up, the statues — poof! — were gone? Now, that would be miraculous.

On Sunday, Strickland issued a statement on Facebook after being chastised for “leaning closer and closer toward white supremacist apologetics” by a pastor in The Commercial Appeal. Strickland’s response was testy, to say the least, and read in part, “I want every Memphian to see the divisive, empty rhetoric that the media chooses to highlight. I want every Memphian to see the absurdity of someone accusing the mayor who is actually working on removing Confederate statues as being an apologist for white supremacists.”

This worked out really well for him because now people are calling him Trump.

• This week’s cover story is about the University of Memphis’ football team and primarily their quarterback Riley Ferguson. Last season, Ferguson emerged from under the shadow of Paxton Lynch and did a pretty good job of it.

My takeaway from the story is that the team will win it all.

• One last thing, this Friday, August 25th, is the last day to vote in this year’s Best of Memphis. I may have mentioned before that I will not say if you don’t vote you can’t complain. Complain all you want.

The 2017 Best of Memphis issue will be on the stands September 27th.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

When you’re a minority in a world of majorities.

CREDIT: Maya Smith

Even though I often find myself in spaces surrounded by people who don’t look like me nor share a cultural common ground with me, I try not to feel self-conscious about the color of my skin or the marked differences of our ancestors’ experiences.

I try not to hone in on those truths. I choose not to contemplate these things, not because I am ashamed of who I am or the amount of melanin in my skin, but because over time, realizing you’re a minority in a world of majorities can be overwhelming.

But there are times, when I can’t help but feel the effects of a system built on discrimination trickle down on me.

There are moments when, despite the efforts I make to respect all people or present myself as a productive, contributing member of society, I’m looked at as inferior based on a false notion birthed from either hate or a lack of understanding of individuals whose skin color or background differs from their own.

One of these moments came last week when I was in the midst of reporting on local activists’ fight to remove two confederate statues from the city. I found myself observing a relentless pursuit by a group of distressed people who look like me stand up for what they believe in.

Maya Smith

Health Sciences Park

On the other hand, I also found myself in an uncomfortable space of division and apathy.

I saw police officers standing in packs, laughing off protesters’ efforts, casually chatting among each other. And then there was the one disinterested cop who thought a protest would be a good time to pick his lunch from his teeth with a stick of floss.

At a protest early in the week, I heard one supercilious cop say to another, “I don’t get their point.” Cop #2 then spat, shrugged, and returned to cleaning his fingernails.

I couldn’t help but glare at the cop who made that statement. He was choosing to be ignorant and dismiss the obvious “point” of their actions: the removal of statues honoring two men who represent racism and hate.

When my eyes met his own entitled eyes, I realized this was the same cop who greeted me with the most condescending smirk I’ve ever received, followed by a disapproving head shake as I approached the protest earlier that evening.

As a journalist, I’m charged with reporting the news without bias, and that mostly comes with ease.

However, in that space of tension last week, not only did I become self-conscious about my brown skin, but I was flooded with emotion.

The prevailing emotion at the time, I believe, was fear. I was afraid of not only what could have transpired at that protest, but afraid of the larger divisive state of the city and the country.

I also felt sad. I was sad that those cops, who took an oath to protect and honor the city’s communities and those living in them, couldn’t even muster up enough empathy to understand where the protesters were coming from.

Coupled with that sadness was anger. I was angry at the people who showed up to “protect the statues” that day and all who have tried in the past. They fail to realize that those statues have a completely different connotation for people with brown skin. Or maybe they do realize it but simply don’t care. That possibly is even more disheartening because no one is free until everyone is free.

I think some might be missing the argument behind wanting the statues gone. No, a statue itself cannot repress a person, but what it represents can.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, who is memorialized in Health Sciences Park for all traveling down Union to see, was heavily involved with the inception of the Ku Klux Klan. The group was formed solely to violently terrorize blacks, northerners, and others whom they opposed.

The KKK has a history rife with violence, oppression, and cruelty — with hate (or perhaps ignorance) at the core of it all.

So, it’s truly, truly hard for me to understand why in 2017 it is okay for the former Grand Wizard to be honored in such a prominent location in a majority black city.

“It’s a part of history,” they say. Or as some like to put it, “you can’t erase history.”

They are so right. I don’t think anyone is stocking up on erasers and time machines. But I do think that the history lesson could be moved to a more appropriate classroom — perhaps a confederate museum.

People should not have to be reminded of a history that thrived on hate and oppression. Why can’t we move on?

So yes, I believe the statues of KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest and president of the confederate states Jefferson Davis should be removed from this city. There’s no question about that.

Still, I won’t stand by the belief that removing figures made of stone and concrete will fix the problems in this city.

Even if the statues came down next week, justice and equality for all in this city would not be achieved overnight. The system would still be broken.

When activism falls short, I believe action must pick up the slack. Let’s do what we can with what we have, right now where we are. That means stepping into our city’s communities of color to lend a hand, meet its needs, tutor, mentor, and uplift. There is groundwork that can be done today to rewrite this city’s future — when will we begin?

Maya Smith is a staff writer for the Flyer.