Tag: Tennessee Historical Commission

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News News Blog

Historical Commission Votes to Remove Forrest Bust from Capitol

headed to a new home

Climaxing a years-long controversy, the Tennessee Historical Commission voted Tuesday, March 9th, to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state Capitol. Meeting virtually, the members of the commission resolved on the long-deliberated and fateful move by a 25 to 1 vote.

The Forrest bust, implanted in a Capitol alcove in 1978 at the behest of the late state Senator Doug Henry (D-Nashville), had been the subject of frequent demands for its removal on account of the Confederate cavalry leader’s background as a slave trader, alleged involvement with the massacre of Black Union troops at Fort Pillow, and his founding of a Ku Klux Klan corps after the Civil War.

Previous efforts to have the bust removed had been turned down by the THC, but momentum had clearly shifted against its retention when the Capitol Commission voted to remove it and Governor Bill Lee, among others, concurred.

The bust of Forrest, along with those of Admirals David Farragut and Albert Gleaves, will be moved from an alcove on the Capitol’s second floor to a section of the nearby State Museum established to deal with military figures of the past.

The fight to remove the Forrest bust coincided in recent years with the successful campaign to take down a bronze statue of the Confederate cavalry leader and Ku Klux Klan figure from its perch atop a pedestal in what is now Health Sciences Park in Downtown Memphis.

The Forrest statue was removed from the park in December 2017.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Which History Should We Honor?

As I drove down the winding highway to the small East Tennessee city of Athens last Thursday, I wondered what the next day’s Tennessee Historical Commission meeting would hold. Under no circumstances did I think the members of the commission would approve Memphis’ waiver request to remove Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue from our public park.

And as I anticipated, the waiver was denied, and “leave history alone” was a recurring theme of the morning.

After Mayor Jim Strickland pleaded with the commission to vote on the city’s request and other officials spoke both for and against the statue, a pro-Forrest teacher from Memphis was the first to take the podium for public comment.

She began her two minutes by saying, “It seems that this day and time everyone is trying to make everything pleasant and fair for everyone.”

I was baffled. Why is it wrong that people of color want a pleasant and fair experience sans a monument of a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard when visiting a public park?

Isn’t that what America is supposed to be all about? Do civil rights not grant everyone the privilege of fairness — especially in public places, if, after all, we live in a country with “liberty and justice for all”?

Continuing to justify why Forrest should be glorified and his statue untouched, the teacher went on to talk about the general’s late-life conversion to Christianity, how he begged for forgiveness for the number of people he mistreated, and turned his life around as a result. “Didn’t Christ forgive us for our many sins? If God can forgive Nathan, why can’t we?” she asked the room.

I can’t speak for everyone in this city or all people of color, but I forgive Nathan. I don’t hate him. I, like many others, would just prefer for him not to be memorialized with such grandeur in a public space in my city.

At Friday’s meeting, Mayor Strickland referenced this article from the Memphis News-Scimitar that was published when the Forrest statue was erected in 1905.

Also, what Forrest did in his personal and religious life is not our concern or a relevant justification for having a statue of him in a public park. He might have repented for his wrongdoings, but that doesn’t change what he did, who he was, and what he stood for.

“The next thing y’all will want to remove are the crosses from our many churches. When does the insanity stop?” the teacher asked rhetorically, as her allotted speaking time ran out.

Was she legitimately putting Nathan Bedford Forrest in the same category with Jesus Christ?

How does a Confederate army general and KKK grand wizard compare to a man that only preached and practiced love. That’s insanity.

After the teacher’s two minutes were up, Lee Millar, the spokesperson for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, was the next to speak.

He claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Memphians support the statue and the history it represents, saying that the statue and history should be left alone.

I understand that history is important. But I don’t understand why someone on the losing side of history deserves a statue. And I definitely don’t understand why the statue of an oppressor is the kind of history that people want to hold on to.

Also, if keeping history in place is the argument for keeping the statue where it is, then it’s faulty. The only history that ever took place where Forrest is buried is the empowerment of whites and the demoralizing of blacks. Which part of history does the statue really honor?

Not the Civil War. As Mayor Strickland pointed out earlier in the meeting, the park where Forrest and his wife are buried now was not a Civil War battle site.

The statue was not erected until years after the war, just as Jim Crow laws were becoming enacted in the South. It was 40 years after the war when the bodies of Forrest and his wife were disinterred from Elmwood Cemetery and moved to the park where the statue was dedicated. The mayor said the park was a landmark that many African Americans passed daily on the way to work, ensuring that Forrest would be ever present and so would the laws of Jim Crow.

“Simply put: This is a monument to Jim Crow,” Strickland said.

I agree. The statue’s got to go. Move Forrest and his wife to a museum, back to a cemetery, or anywhere else but a public park in a majority black city.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.

Categories
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.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Pinch District Keeps Historic Designation

The Pinch District won’t lose its listing on the National Register of Historic Places any time soon.

In January, the Pinch was in the crosshairs of the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC) to be removed from the register. The commission said the area had lost many of its buildings, and “has lost the significance for which it was listed and no longer retains integrity of location, setting, design, materials, workmanship, and feeling.”

But the THC deferred a decision on the removal in January. In a letter to state Senator Lee Harris, E. Patrick McIntyre, executive director of THC and the State Historic Preservation Office, said “I have deferred consideration for the de-listing of the Pinch District indefinitely.”

View of the Pyramid and Pinch District

Harris said Pinch constituents asked him to get involved in the decision just as he was taking office in January. Since then, he said he’s been in talks with the THC and planned public meetings on the topic.

“For now, that fire is out,” Harris said in a Friday meeting with Pinch stakeholders.

But he warned that things could change if the THC gets new board members or a new executive director.

Listing on the National Register goes beyond words on a plaque. June West, executive director of Memphis Heritage, said Friday the degeneration allows building owners to leverage historic tax credits to renovate their properties.

“If it had been de-listed, each individual property owner would have had to nominate their building as an independent, self-standing building to be on the National Register,” she said. “In some cases, some of the buildings probably would not be allowed to do that on their own because they may not have the significance that the National Register might require.”

The news comes as Pinch neighbors and business owners prepare for the MEMFix event (the city’s ongoing series of neighborhood revitalization festivals) happening there on Saturday, April 11th. Friday’s MEMFix meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel brought together stakeholders and volunteers to get the Pinch ready for hundreds of visitors expected at the event.

John Paul Shaffer, Livable Memphis program director, looked down at the Pinch from an 11th story window in the hotel. He pointed to lots of vacant properties there but noted the many opportunities for development. From the window, it was hard not to notice the huge, silver Bass Pro Shops sign on the Pyramid and just how close it is to the Pinch.

“The thinking on the part of the Pinch stakeholders was to get out in front of Bass Pro,” Shaffer said. “to bring attention to the Pinch to say, ‘We’re here. We’ve been here. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Now’s our opportunity to show everyone where we are on the map’.”

Many of the vacant lots in the Pinch got that way by lack of restrictions on surface parking lots when the Pyramid was built. So many buildings came down as property owners looked to cash in on Pyramid parkers.

In fact, the original nomination to the National Register was comprised of 41 buildings or sites in the Pinch. The figure was bumped up to 43 in 1990 in an administrative correction. But in the time of the Pyramid’s construction and its closure, only 19 of the buildings remain in the Pinch.

“The expanse of vacant lots is distressing for what once was the cradle of the City of Memphis,” the THC petition says.