The evidence is just so clear that it's "heritage, not hate". I don't know how in the world my life experiences of living in the South for the last 25 years ever led me to believe the confederate sympathizers were just a smidge racist. What a terrible mistake I've made.
The evidence is just so clear that it's "heritage, not hate". I don't know how in the world my life experiences of living in the South for the last 25 years ever led me to believe the confederate sympathizers were just a smidge racist. What a terrible mistake I've made.
I've lived in South Carolina since 1999. I have yet to meet a single confederate flag sympathizer that wasn't also a racist. Now, a couple of them I am not 100% sure they are. In those instances, however, my I default to them being racist.
will myself to find a home, a home within myself we will find a way, we will find our place
Just saw this movie this evening (what a movie!) and had two thoughts. One, how far we've come since the 1940's regarding race in America. But then, two, I couldn't help but ask, how is it possible there is still so much hate and racial strife in America and what will it take to finally move past the ignorance? By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38476594
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Just saw this movie this evening (what a movie!) and had two thoughts. One, how far we've come since the 1940's regarding race in America. But then, two, I couldn't help but ask, how is it possible there is still so much hate and racial strife in America and what will it take to finally move past the ignorance? By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38476594
There is a statue outside of the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium with Pee Wee Reese with his arm around Robinson.
Just saw this movie this evening (what a movie!) and had two thoughts. One, how far we've come since the 1940's regarding race in America. But then, two, I couldn't help but ask, how is it possible there is still so much hate and racial strife in America and what will it take to finally move past the ignorance? By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38476594
There is a statue outside of the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium with Pee Wee Reese with his arm around Robinson.
That's great! That moment was one of my favorites in the film.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Yeah, in Ohio. The birthplace of Grant. And Sherman. The state which contributed the most Union soldiers. The state who's hockey team is the Blue Jackets.
Yeah, in Ohio. The birthplace of Grant. And Sherman. The state which contributed the most Union soldiers. The state who's hockey team is the Blue Jackets.
Heritage not hate?
I-71 nb side. Since I was a little kid, easily 40+ years ago now, I have seen the same metal pole barn with its southern facing roof (directed at the freeway) painted with the confederate flag. down near Lebanon.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Yeah, in Ohio. The birthplace of Grant. And Sherman. The state which contributed the most Union soldiers. The state who's hockey team is the Blue Jackets.
Heritage not hate?
I-71 nb side. Since I was a little kid, easily 40+ years ago now, I have seen the same metal pole barn with its southern facing roof (directed at the freeway) painted with the confederate flag. down near Lebanon.
Those of us from NE Ohio (metro Cleveland) firmly believe that Ohio ends somewhere south of Columbus, right around Athens (OU). After that, it's straight up KY. This just affirms that belief.
Yeah, in Ohio. The birthplace of Grant. And Sherman. The state which contributed the most Union soldiers. The state who's hockey team is the Blue Jackets.
Heritage not hate?
I-71 nb side. Since I was a little kid, easily 40+ years ago now, I have seen the same metal pole barn with its southern facing roof (directed at the freeway) painted with the confederate flag. down near Lebanon.
Those of us from NE Ohio (metro Cleveland) firmly believe that Ohio ends somewhere south of Columbus, right around Athens (OU). After that, it's straight up KY. This just affirms that belief.
they dont call grove city(sw burb of columbus) grovetucky for shits and giggles.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
How come no one is talking about the no statues of all the black folks who ended up at the end of a rope why is it the only statutes put up were the generals who led their armies into war on behalf of oppression ? just a thought ...
How come no one is talking about the no statues of all the black folks who ended up at the end of a rope why is it the only statutes put up were the generals who led their armies into war on behalf of oppression ? just a thought ...
big museum being built in alabama or mississippi on that very subject.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
How come no one is talking about the no statues of all the black folks who ended up at the end of a rope why is it the only statutes put up were the generals who led their armies into war on behalf of oppression ? just a thought ...
big museum being built in alabama or mississippi on that very subject.
Nice it's about time ! The victims deserve to be remembered ..
What conclusions are drawn from this letter to Horace Greeley from Abe Lincoln about the Civil War?
Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.
Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.
I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through
the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or
assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do
not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any
inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not
now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable
in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference
to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not
meant to leave any one in doubt.
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under
the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be
restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was."
If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they
could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with
them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they
could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with
them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the
Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If
I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would
do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving
others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and
the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the
Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not
believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less
whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the
cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing
more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when
shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they
shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official
duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal
wish that all men every where could be free.
Yours,
A. Lincoln.
Here's what I pulled out, but maybe you skipped this part:
"I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."
C'mon, you expected 3D to see or comprehend that? C'mon.
Memphis erases Confederate general from its public spaces
By ADRIAN SAINZ
2 hours ago
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s polarizing presence has hung over Memphis since he moved here in 1852 — his legacy cemented by a giant statue that loomed over all who passed his gravesite in a popular park.
Defenders considered him a hero for his Civil War exploits. Detractors called him a violent racist and noted his early leadership role in the Ku Klux Klan.
Now the former slave trader's remains are set to be moved to a new Confederate museum in Columbia, Tennessee — another milestone in the effort to remove statues, monuments, and now the remains, of Confederate leaders from public spaces.
As workers prepared to dig up his grave earlier this month, a white man waved a rebel flag, sang “Dixie” and launched an expletive-laced tirade at Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer. Sawyer, who is Black, plucked Confederate flags off a chain-link fence surrounding the site as George Johnson paced behind her on a concrete platform.
When he cursed at her again, Sawyer replied: “It’s not your property,” and turned toward reporters gathered for the June 1 news conference.
Health Sciences Park, where Forrest and his wife had been buried for more than a century, was called Forrest Park until 2013, when the name was changed. The statue of the general on horseback was removed in 2017, after a campaign Sawyer helped lead.
Now, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have agreed to transport his remains to their National Confederate Museum at the historic Elm Springs estate in Columbia, 200 miles away.
The group's spokesman, Lee Millar, a distant cousin of Forrest, said the bodies of Forrest and his wife were in an undisclosed location until they can be moved to the museum.
“Memphis is not the town that Forrest grew up in,” he said. “It’s just deleting his history and forgetting about the past.”
Gradually, Forrest’s legacy has been dismantled in Memphis. Forrest traded slaves near the area where people of many races now come to eat, drink and watch ball games downtown. A short drive away is the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Many in majority-Black Memphis are eager to see Forrest gone. The park where his grave was located has been the site of protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. A music festival for Juneteenth, which marks the end of American slavery, is scheduled there this weekend.
“It’s like a burden has been lifted,” said Van D. Turner, a Black county commissioner who pushed for the Forrest statue removal. “It just gives us breath."
Elsewhere in Tennessee, activists and Democratic lawmakers have called for the removal of a bust of Forrest from the state Capitol in Nashville. At Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s recommendation, the Tennessee Historical Commission voted to take down the bust, but GOP legislators argued another commission’s vote is needed. No removal plans have been announced.
After amassing wealth in Memphis, Forrest joined the rebel cause. Wounded four times, he led lightning raids on supply lines and commanded troops at Shiloh, Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.
Jack Hurst, author of “Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography,” says Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general.
In April 1864, Forrest’s troops attacked Fort Pillow in northwest Tennessee and killed an estimated 200 to 300 Union soldiers, most of them Black. Forrest was later accused of massacring them as they tried to surrender.
Historians say he was an early Klan leader, though some Forrest supporters dispute that, saying he was offended by its growing penchant for violence.
The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved to the Health Sciences Park site in 1904, where his statue towered above passers-by walking to work or to the nearby University of Tennessee medical school until its 2017 removal.
“The statue was reprehensible and was offensive,” said Sawyer, who says she received threats for her activism in getting it taken down. “It wasn’t something I believed belonged in our city.”
In December 2017, Memphis sold Forrest Park to a newly created non-profit, Memphis Greenspace, led by Commissioner Turner. The sale to a private entity circumvented a state law prohibiting the removal of historical monuments from public areas.
On the night of Dec. 20, 2017, a crane removed the statue from its pedestal. The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, citing the state law, but a Nashville judge ruled against them.
Greenspace eventually gave the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a judge signed an agreement approved by Forrest’s relatives to send the couple's remains to the group's privately funded museum, where Civil War artifacts are displayed.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans paid for the disinterment, using contractors and volunteers, including Johnson, the man who confronted Sawyer.
A monument to Forrest at the museum likely will be installed outdoors, in a park setting, where Millar said the former Confederate general can rest in peace.
“There has been some vandalism, some spray paint, protests," Millar said of the park in Memphis. “The general wouldn’t be happy the way things are here.”
For Turner, the ouster of the Confederate monuments and Forrest’s remains is “undoing an injustice” in a city still dealing with King's assassination.
“I hope that it gives life to the city," Turner said, “and it lets the city know that we don’t have to allow our past to drag us down.”
___
AP writers Mark Humphrey in Columbia, Tennessee, and Jonathan Mattise in Nashville contributed.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I do think that as the current older population dies off (at least the ones that support confederate bullshit) we will see more and more of this. The younger generation has little tolerance for this shit.
Remember the Thomas Nine !! (10/02/2018) The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago 2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy 2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE) 2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston 2020: Oakland, Oakland:2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana 2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville 2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Charlottesville set to remove Lee statue that sparked rally
By SARAH RANKIN
2 hours ago
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that became a rallying point for white supremacists and helped inspire their infamous 2017 rally in Charlottesville will be hoisted off its pedestal this weekend and sent to storage, officials announced Friday.
The Lee statue and another Confederate tribute nearby are both scheduled to be removed Saturday, nearly four years after violence erupted at the “Unite the Right” rally. The chaos left 32-year-old protester Heather Heyer dead and sparked a national debate over racial equity, further inflamed by former President Donald Trump's insistence that there was "blame on both sides.”
A coalition of activists issued a statement Friday celebrating the announcement. Because of litigation and changes to a state law dealing with war memorials, the city had been unable to act until now.
As long as the statues "remain standing in our downtown public spaces, they signal that our community tolerated white supremacy and the Lost Cause these generals fought for," the coalition called Take 'Em Down Cville said.
Preparations around the parks where the statues stand were to begin Friday and included the installation of protective fencing, the news release said. Designated public viewing areas for the removals will be established.
Only the statues of Lee and Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will be removed for now, the city said. The stone bases of the monuments will be left in place temporarily and removed later.
The statues are perched in places of relative prominence in Charlottesville, a small, picturesque city in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and home to the University of Virginia. Commissioned by a UVA graduate and erected in the 1920s, when Jim Crow laws were eroding the rights of Black citizens, the statues are just blocks apart from each other.
The Charlottesville City Council voted in February 2017 to take down the Lee statue amid mounting public pressure, including a petition started by a Black high school student, Zyahna Bryant.
A lawsuit was quickly filed, putting the city’s plans on hold, and white supremacists seized on the issue.
First, they rallied by torchlight at the statue in May 2017, then a small group of Klansmen gathered in July, far outnumbered by peaceful protesters.
The issue reached a crescendo in August, when white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally gathered in the city to defend the Lee statue and seize on the issue for publicity, meeting in what was the largest such gathering of extremists in at least a decade.
They brawled in the streets near the statue with anti-racist counterprotesters as police largely stood by and watched. The scenes of intense violence shocked the nation. A short time later, an avowed white supremacist and admirer of Adolf Hitler intentionally plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing Heyer and leaving others with life-altering injuries.
Trump's suggestion at a later news conference that there had been “very fine people, on both sides” led to a crush of criticism from Republicans, Democrats and business leaders.
Charlottesville continued to fight in court for the removal of the Lee statue and additionally voted to remove the Jackson figure. But a circuit court judge prevented the city from even shrouding the statues with tarps.
After Democrats took control of the General Assembly in the 2019 elections, the monument-protection law was rewritten in 2020. Since then, local governments across the state have removed statues that stood for a century or more.
Charlottesville, however, waited for the resolution of the lawsuit, which came in April, when the state’s highest court sided with the city.
Since that ruling, the city government has been working its way through the requirements of the new law, like holding a public hearing and offering the statue to a museum or historical society for possible relocation. The offer period for Charlottesville’s statues ended Thursday.
Ten responses have been received so far, Friday's news release said, and the city remains open to “additional expressions of interest.” Under the new law, the city has the final say in the statues' disposition.
Both will be stored in a secure location on city property until the City Council makes a final decision, the news release said.
In the aftermath of the rally, Charlottesville residents unleashed a torrent of pain, anger and frustration at city and state officials, laying bare deeper issues about race and economic inequality. Activists have since pushed the city to address its legacies of racism and slavery and its dearth of affordable housing and police accountability, among other issues.
Kristin Szakos, who was a City Council member at the time of the rally, said in an interview earlier this week that there was a determination to make sure the lessons of 2017 were learned.
“It really brought up a lot of awareness of white supremacy that is not just from visitors from Idaho, but also from structures in our own culture and in our own institutions that we have to deal with. And that those are more important than just chasing Nazis out of our town,” she said.
Szakos, no longer in office, said the city has made some progress toward that work and that the statue removals will be another step in the right direction.
City officials have said they plan to redesign the park spaces where the statues are located “in a way that promotes healing and that tells a more complete history of Charlottesville.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Here's an interesting opinion on a VA Supreme Court case regarding Lee's statue in Richmond.
Opinion: Richmond’s Lee statue, after 131 years, is an unpardonable insult
Jeffrey Boutwell, a former resident of Spotsylvania County, Va., is a distant cousin of George S. Boutwell.
In the coming weeks, the Virginia Supreme Court will make known its decision regarding the fate of the most prominent Confederate memorial still standing in the nation: the 60-foot-tall equestrian statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee overlooking Monument Avenue in Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy.
Unveiled in 1890, the Lee statue has stood supreme among the hundreds of memorials and monuments throughout the South honoring the Confederacy and its rebellion against the Union. By 1920, it had been joined on Monument Avenue by memorials to Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart and President Jefferson Davis, making the street a pantheon to Confederate war heroes.
The dedication of the Lee statue occurred, ironically, on May 29, just days before Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day to honor the hundreds of thousands of Union troops who died in the Civil War. In a ceremony described by one Virginia newspaper as “the greatest day” in Richmond history, more than 150,000 people celebrated with parades, cannons, fireworks and the singing of “Dixie” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia.”
Up north, the Boston Daily Globe provided extensive coverage of the event under the headline, “Immortal Lee.” In an accompanying editorial, the paper echoed the dominant theme of North-South reconciliation then common in the country, noting how “the gaping wounds of civil strife have now healed … [and] the past has lost its power to sting and wound.”
This would have been news to the nearly 4 million Blacks then living in the South and subject to increasingly harsh Jim Crow laws, lynchings and white supremacist violence. For them, “the gaping wounds” of slavery and the Civil War had not healed and the past had not “lost its power to sting and wound.”
The Boston Daily Traveler saw things quite differently. In an editorial entitled “An Unpardonable Insult,” the paper criticized the ceremony in Richmond for seeking to elevate Lee to “the same pedestal of honor and greatness” as George Washington. In blunt language, the paper contrasted the actions of these two native sons of Virginia, declaring that Washington would never “have engaged in a war for the destruction of the American Union in obedience to the action of Virginia,” as Lee did.
The Daily Traveler also noted an incident that was a premonition of things to come. At the ceremony, someone in the crowd placed a Confederate flag in the hands of a nearby statue of George Washington and “there it remained during the day” — similar to the “unpardonable insult” of a Confederate flag being carried into the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 by supporters of President Donald Trump seeking to violently prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.
I discovered an original of the 131-year-old Daily Traveler editorial among the papers of George S. Boutwell, a Massachusetts congressman who helped enact the 14th and 15th amendments in the 1860s guaranteeing political and civil equality to Blacks. After serving as treasury secretary for President Ulysses S. Grant, Boutwell was elected to the Senate, where he led an investigation of white supremacist violence in Mississippi. It’s little wonder that Boutwell would greatly sympathize with the sentiments of the Daily Traveler editorial.
By the time of the Lee statue dedication in 1890, it was apparent to Boutwell and the Daily Traveler that the proliferation of Confederate memorials was but a symbol of the victory of the Lost Cause campaign of the South in rehabilitating notions of white supremacy. The next several decades saw the spread of Jim Crow laws and the institutional racism, South and North, that has crippled our society well into the 21st century. Only now, sparked by the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests, is the United States beginning to seriously reckon with that legacy.
To give Richmond due credit, its city council made the decision in 2020 to remove and relocate all those Confederate memorials on Monument Avenue that were on city property. As the Lee statue is on property deeded by private citizens to the Commonwealth of Virginia, it is up to the state Supreme Court to decide its ultimate fate.
Whatever that decision may be, our national debate over the potency of white supremacist symbols will continue. Though it is certainly appropriate that Americans remember and respect all who fought and died in our great and terrible Civil War, had Lee and his Confederate flag been victorious, the United States today would be a very different place — if it existed at all.
The base is all tagged by spray paint but it's surrounded by a giant fence all around. It's a total eyesore at this point. Monument Ave. does look strange though.
The base is all tagged by spray paint but it's surrounded by a giant fence all around. It's a total eyesore at this point. Monument Ave. does look strange though.
The base is all tagged by spray paint but it's surrounded by a giant fence all around. It's a total eyesore at this point. Monument Ave. does look strange though.
Which way do you see the court ruling?
I have no guess, honestly. But I don’t know why the five residents want it there anymore. They had originally said removing the statues decreased their property values, which is probably true. Monument in that section is probably the second wealthiest street in the city. But now there’s one statue left and it’s fenced off. If they win the case, it will still need to be protected as it will be vandalized. It’ll never be how it was. They are better off replacing the statues. The homes in that area are beautiful and it’s a great area all around. The city needs to replace them all. The plaintiffs are better off moving on.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — A Confederate monument that helped spark a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been hoisted off its stone pedestal.
Work to remove the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee began early Saturday morning. Crews were also expected to take down a second Confederate monument.
Spectators by the dozens lined the blocks surrounding the park, and a cheer went up as the statue lifted off the pedestal.
There was a visible police presence, with streets blocked off to vehicular traffic by fencing and heavy trucks.
Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker gave a speech in front of reporters and observers as the crane neared the monument.
“Taking down this statue is one small step closer to the goal of helping Charlottesville, Virginia, and America, grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy Black people for economic gain,” Walker said.
The removal of the statue follows years of contention, community anguish and litigation. A long, winding legal fight coupled with changes in a state law that protected war memorials had held up the removal for years.
Saturday’s removal of a statue of Lee and another of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will come nearly four years after violence erupted at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally. Heather Heyer, a peaceful counterprotester, died in the violence, which sparked a national debate over racial equity, further inflamed by former President Donald Trump’s insistence that there was “blame on both sides.”
Only the statues, not their stone pedestals, will be removed Saturday. They will be taken down and stored in a secure location until the City Council makes a final decision about what should be done with them. Under state law, the city was required to solicit parties interested in taking the statues during an offer period that ended Thursday. It received 10 responses to its solicitation.
A coalition of activists commended the city for moving quickly to take the statues down after the offer period ended. As long as the statues “remain standing in our downtown public spaces, they signal that our community tolerated white supremacy and the Lost Cause these generals fought for,” the coalition called Take ’Em Down Cville said.
The most recent removal push focused on the Lee monument began in 2016, thanks in part to a petition started by a Black high school student, Zyahna Bryant. A lawsuit was quickly filed, putting the city’s plans on hold, and white supremacists seized on the issue.
“This is well overdue,” said Bryant, who's now a student at the University of Virginia. “No platform for white supremacy."
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Memphis erases Confederate general from its public spaces
By ADRIAN SAINZ
19 Jun 2021
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s polarizing presence has hung over Memphis since he moved here in 1852 — his legacy cemented by a giant statue that loomed over all who passed his gravesite in a popular park.
Defenders considered him a hero for his Civil War exploits. Detractors called him a violent racist and noted his early leadership role in the Ku Klux Klan.
Now the former slave trader's remains are set to be moved to a new Confederate museum in Columbia, Tennessee — another milestone in the effort to remove statues, monuments, and now the remains, of Confederate leaders from public spaces.
As workers prepared to dig up his grave earlier this month, a white man waved a rebel flag, sang “Dixie” and launched an expletive-laced tirade at Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer. Sawyer, who is Black, plucked Confederate flags off a chain-link fence surrounding the site as George Johnson paced behind her on a concrete platform.
When he cursed at her again, Sawyer replied: “It’s not your property,” and turned toward reporters gathered for the June 1 news conference.
Health Sciences Park, where Forrest and his wife had been buried for more than a century, was called Forrest Park until 2013, when the name was changed. The statue of the general on horseback was removed in 2017, after a campaign Sawyer helped lead.
Now, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have agreed to transport his remains to their National Confederate Museum at the historic Elm Springs estate in Columbia, 200 miles away.
The group's spokesman, Lee Millar, a distant cousin of Forrest, said the bodies of Forrest and his wife were in an undisclosed location until they can be moved to the museum.
“Memphis is not the town that Forrest grew up in,” he said. “It’s just deleting his history and forgetting about the past.”
Gradually, Forrest’s legacy has been dismantled in Memphis. Forrest traded slaves near the area where people of many races now come to eat, drink and watch ball games downtown. A short drive away is the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Many in majority-Black Memphis are eager to see Forrest gone. The park where his grave was located has been the site of protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. A music festival for Juneteenth, which marks the end of American slavery, is scheduled there this weekend.
“It’s like a burden has been lifted,” said Van D. Turner, a Black county commissioner who pushed for the Forrest statue removal. “It just gives us breath."
Elsewhere in Tennessee, activists and Democratic lawmakers have called for the removal of a bust of Forrest from the state Capitol in Nashville. At Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s recommendation, the Tennessee Historical Commission voted to take down the bust, but GOP legislators argued another commission’s vote is needed. No removal plans have been announced.
After amassing wealth in Memphis, Forrest joined the rebel cause. Wounded four times, he led lightning raids on supply lines and commanded troops at Shiloh, Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.
Jack Hurst, author of “Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography,” says Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general.
In April 1864, Forrest’s troops attacked Fort Pillow in northwest Tennessee and killed an estimated 200 to 300 Union soldiers, most of them Black. Forrest was later accused of massacring them as they tried to surrender.
Historians say he was an early Klan leader, though some Forrest supporters dispute that, saying he was offended by its growing penchant for violence.
The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved to the Health Sciences Park site in 1904, where his statue towered above passers-by walking to work or to the nearby University of Tennessee medical school until its 2017 removal.
“The statue was reprehensible and was offensive,” said Sawyer, who says she received threats for her activism in getting it taken down. “It wasn’t something I believed belonged in our city.”
In December 2017, Memphis sold Forrest Park to a newly created non-profit, Memphis Greenspace, led by Commissioner Turner. The sale to a private entity circumvented a state law prohibiting the removal of historical monuments from public areas.
On the night of Dec. 20, 2017, a crane removed the statue from its pedestal. The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, citing the state law, but a Nashville judge ruled against them.
Greenspace eventually gave the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a judge signed an agreement approved by Forrest’s relatives to send the couple's remains to the group's privately funded museum, where Civil War artifacts are displayed.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans paid for the disinterment, using contractors and volunteers, including Johnson, the man who confronted Sawyer.
A monument to Forrest at the museum likely will be installed outdoors, in a park setting, where Millar said the former Confederate general can rest in peace.
“There has been some vandalism, some spray paint, protests," Millar said of the park in Memphis. “The general wouldn’t be happy the way things are here.”
For Turner, the ouster of the Confederate monuments and Forrest’s remains is “undoing an injustice” in a city still dealing with King's assassination.
“I hope that it gives life to the city," Turner said, “and it lets the city know that we don’t have to allow our past to drag us down.”
___
AP writers Mark Humphrey in Columbia, Tennessee, and Jonathan Mattise in Nashville contributed.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Body of Nathan Bedford Forrest removed from Memphis park
By ADRIAN SAINZ
11 Jun 2021
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Workers have removed the remains of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from a Tennessee park, officials said Friday, marking another step in the process of moving their bodies out of Memphis and to a museum hundreds of miles away.
Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Lee Millar said the remains of the former slave trader and his wife were removed Monday and are being held in an undisclosed location until they can be transported later to the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs in Columbia.
Owned by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, the museum opened to the public in October. It is located about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Memphis.
The removal of the remains of the early Ku Klux Klan leader from Memphis, where he served as an alderman and traded slaves before joining the Confederate Army, would end a long-running dispute over his legacy and presence in the majority-Black city.
It is also another example of how cities and activists have taken steps in recent years to get rid of statues and monuments of historical figures who supported the South’s secession and led the fight against the North, from Gen. Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.
Crews arrived June 1 at Health Sciences Park to begin work on Forrest's tomb. The park used to bear the name of Forrest and feature a statue of the cavalryman on a horse, but the name has been changed and the statue removed in recent years.
With the approval of Forrest’s relatives, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is overseeing the move. A judge approved it late last year, ending a long legal battle.
The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved from a Memphis cemetery and buried under the statue of the former Memphis City Council member in 1904. The city took down the statue in December 2017 after selling the public park to a nonprofit group, thus circumventing a state law barring the removal of historic monuments from public areas.
A judge in Nashville ruled that the city and Memphis Greenspace, the nonprofit that made the park privately operated, removed the statue legally. The statue will also be moved to the Confederate museum in Columbia.
The park where Forrest was buried has been the site of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists have long called for the removal of both the statue and the remains. The words “Black Lives Matter” have been painted in yellow by activists on a walkway surrounding the tomb.
___
This story corrects the first paragraph to reflect that bodies were removed Monday and announced Friday.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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Comments
we will find a way, we will find our place
By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38476594
Yeah, in Ohio. The birthplace of Grant. And Sherman.
The state which contributed the most Union soldiers.
The state who's hockey team is the Blue Jackets.
Heritage not hate?
I-71 nb side. Since I was a little kid, easily 40+ years ago now, I have seen the same metal pole barn with its southern facing roof (directed at the freeway) painted with the confederate flag. down near Lebanon.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
they dont call grove city(sw burb of columbus) grovetucky for shits and giggles.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
big museum being built in alabama or mississippi on that very subject.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s polarizing presence has hung over Memphis since he moved here in 1852 — his legacy cemented by a giant statue that loomed over all who passed his gravesite in a popular park.
Defenders considered him a hero for his Civil War exploits. Detractors called him a violent racist and noted his early leadership role in the Ku Klux Klan.
Now the former slave trader's remains are set to be moved to a new Confederate museum in Columbia, Tennessee — another milestone in the effort to remove statues, monuments, and now the remains, of Confederate leaders from public spaces.
As workers prepared to dig up his grave earlier this month, a white man waved a rebel flag, sang “Dixie” and launched an expletive-laced tirade at Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer. Sawyer, who is Black, plucked Confederate flags off a chain-link fence surrounding the site as George Johnson paced behind her on a concrete platform.
When he cursed at her again, Sawyer replied: “It’s not your property,” and turned toward reporters gathered for the June 1 news conference.
Health Sciences Park, where Forrest and his wife had been buried for more than a century, was called Forrest Park until 2013, when the name was changed. The statue of the general on horseback was removed in 2017, after a campaign Sawyer helped lead.
Now, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have agreed to transport his remains to their National Confederate Museum at the historic Elm Springs estate in Columbia, 200 miles away.
The group's spokesman, Lee Millar, a distant cousin of Forrest, said the bodies of Forrest and his wife were in an undisclosed location until they can be moved to the museum.
“Memphis is not the town that Forrest grew up in,” he said. “It’s just deleting his history and forgetting about the past.”
Gradually, Forrest’s legacy has been dismantled in Memphis. Forrest traded slaves near the area where people of many races now come to eat, drink and watch ball games downtown. A short drive away is the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Many in majority-Black Memphis are eager to see Forrest gone. The park where his grave was located has been the site of protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. A music festival for Juneteenth, which marks the end of American slavery, is scheduled there this weekend.
“It’s like a burden has been lifted,” said Van D. Turner, a Black county commissioner who pushed for the Forrest statue removal. “It just gives us breath."
Elsewhere in Tennessee, activists and Democratic lawmakers have called for the removal of a bust of Forrest from the state Capitol in Nashville. At Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s recommendation, the Tennessee Historical Commission voted to take down the bust, but GOP legislators argued another commission’s vote is needed. No removal plans have been announced.
After amassing wealth in Memphis, Forrest joined the rebel cause. Wounded four times, he led lightning raids on supply lines and commanded troops at Shiloh, Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.
Jack Hurst, author of “Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography,” says Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general.
In April 1864, Forrest’s troops attacked Fort Pillow in northwest Tennessee and killed an estimated 200 to 300 Union soldiers, most of them Black. Forrest was later accused of massacring them as they tried to surrender.
Historians say he was an early Klan leader, though some Forrest supporters dispute that, saying he was offended by its growing penchant for violence.
The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved to the Health Sciences Park site in 1904, where his statue towered above passers-by walking to work or to the nearby University of Tennessee medical school until its 2017 removal.
“The statue was reprehensible and was offensive,” said Sawyer, who says she received threats for her activism in getting it taken down. “It wasn’t something I believed belonged in our city.”
In December 2017, Memphis sold Forrest Park to a newly created non-profit, Memphis Greenspace, led by Commissioner Turner. The sale to a private entity circumvented a state law prohibiting the removal of historical monuments from public areas.
On the night of Dec. 20, 2017, a crane removed the statue from its pedestal. The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, citing the state law, but a Nashville judge ruled against them.
Greenspace eventually gave the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a judge signed an agreement approved by Forrest’s relatives to send the couple's remains to the group's privately funded museum, where Civil War artifacts are displayed.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans paid for the disinterment, using contractors and volunteers, including Johnson, the man who confronted Sawyer.
A monument to Forrest at the museum likely will be installed outdoors, in a park setting, where Millar said the former Confederate general can rest in peace.
“There has been some vandalism, some spray paint, protests," Millar said of the park in Memphis. “The general wouldn’t be happy the way things are here.”
For Turner, the ouster of the Confederate monuments and Forrest’s remains is “undoing an injustice” in a city still dealing with King's assassination.
“I hope that it gives life to the city," Turner said, “and it lets the city know that we don’t have to allow our past to drag us down.”
___
AP writers Mark Humphrey in Columbia, Tennessee, and Jonathan Mattise in Nashville contributed.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that became a rallying point for white supremacists and helped inspire their infamous 2017 rally in Charlottesville will be hoisted off its pedestal this weekend and sent to storage, officials announced Friday.
The Lee statue and another Confederate tribute nearby are both scheduled to be removed Saturday, nearly four years after violence erupted at the “Unite the Right” rally. The chaos left 32-year-old protester Heather Heyer dead and sparked a national debate over racial equity, further inflamed by former President Donald Trump's insistence that there was "blame on both sides.”
A coalition of activists issued a statement Friday celebrating the announcement. Because of litigation and changes to a state law dealing with war memorials, the city had been unable to act until now.
As long as the statues "remain standing in our downtown public spaces, they signal that our community tolerated white supremacy and the Lost Cause these generals fought for," the coalition called Take 'Em Down Cville said.
Preparations around the parks where the statues stand were to begin Friday and included the installation of protective fencing, the news release said. Designated public viewing areas for the removals will be established.
Only the statues of Lee and Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will be removed for now, the city said. The stone bases of the monuments will be left in place temporarily and removed later.
The statues are perched in places of relative prominence in Charlottesville, a small, picturesque city in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and home to the University of Virginia. Commissioned by a UVA graduate and erected in the 1920s, when Jim Crow laws were eroding the rights of Black citizens, the statues are just blocks apart from each other.
The Charlottesville City Council voted in February 2017 to take down the Lee statue amid mounting public pressure, including a petition started by a Black high school student, Zyahna Bryant.
A lawsuit was quickly filed, putting the city’s plans on hold, and white supremacists seized on the issue.
First, they rallied by torchlight at the statue in May 2017, then a small group of Klansmen gathered in July, far outnumbered by peaceful protesters.
The issue reached a crescendo in August, when white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally gathered in the city to defend the Lee statue and seize on the issue for publicity, meeting in what was the largest such gathering of extremists in at least a decade.
They brawled in the streets near the statue with anti-racist counterprotesters as police largely stood by and watched. The scenes of intense violence shocked the nation. A short time later, an avowed white supremacist and admirer of Adolf Hitler intentionally plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing Heyer and leaving others with life-altering injuries.
Trump's suggestion at a later news conference that there had been “very fine people, on both sides” led to a crush of criticism from Republicans, Democrats and business leaders.
Charlottesville continued to fight in court for the removal of the Lee statue and additionally voted to remove the Jackson figure. But a circuit court judge prevented the city from even shrouding the statues with tarps.
After Democrats took control of the General Assembly in the 2019 elections, the monument-protection law was rewritten in 2020. Since then, local governments across the state have removed statues that stood for a century or more.
Charlottesville, however, waited for the resolution of the lawsuit, which came in April, when the state’s highest court sided with the city.
Since that ruling, the city government has been working its way through the requirements of the new law, like holding a public hearing and offering the statue to a museum or historical society for possible relocation. The offer period for Charlottesville’s statues ended Thursday.
Ten responses have been received so far, Friday's news release said, and the city remains open to “additional expressions of interest.” Under the new law, the city has the final say in the statues' disposition.
Both will be stored in a secure location on city property until the City Council makes a final decision, the news release said.
In the aftermath of the rally, Charlottesville residents unleashed a torrent of pain, anger and frustration at city and state officials, laying bare deeper issues about race and economic inequality. Activists have since pushed the city to address its legacies of racism and slavery and its dearth of affordable housing and police accountability, among other issues.
Kristin Szakos, who was a City Council member at the time of the rally, said in an interview earlier this week that there was a determination to make sure the lessons of 2017 were learned.
“It really brought up a lot of awareness of white supremacy that is not just from visitors from Idaho, but also from structures in our own culture and in our own institutions that we have to deal with. And that those are more important than just chasing Nazis out of our town,” she said.
Szakos, no longer in office, said the city has made some progress toward that work and that the statue removals will be another step in the right direction.
City officials have said they plan to redesign the park spaces where the statues are located “in a way that promotes healing and that tells a more complete history of Charlottesville.”
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Opinion: Richmond’s Lee statue, after 131 years, is an unpardonable insult
Jeffrey Boutwell, a former resident of Spotsylvania County, Va., is a distant cousin of George S. Boutwell.
In the coming weeks, the Virginia Supreme Court will make known its decision regarding the fate of the most prominent Confederate memorial still standing in the nation: the 60-foot-tall equestrian statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee overlooking Monument Avenue in Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy.
Unveiled in 1890, the Lee statue has stood supreme among the hundreds of memorials and monuments throughout the South honoring the Confederacy and its rebellion against the Union. By 1920, it had been joined on Monument Avenue by memorials to Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart and President Jefferson Davis, making the street a pantheon to Confederate war heroes.
The dedication of the Lee statue occurred, ironically, on May 29, just days before Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day to honor the hundreds of thousands of Union troops who died in the Civil War. In a ceremony described by one Virginia newspaper as “the greatest day” in Richmond history, more than 150,000 people celebrated with parades, cannons, fireworks and the singing of “Dixie” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia.”
Up north, the Boston Daily Globe provided extensive coverage of the event under the headline, “Immortal Lee.” In an accompanying editorial, the paper echoed the dominant theme of North-South reconciliation then common in the country, noting how “the gaping wounds of civil strife have now healed … [and] the past has lost its power to sting and wound.”
This would have been news to the nearly 4 million Blacks then living in the South and subject to increasingly harsh Jim Crow laws, lynchings and white supremacist violence. For them, “the gaping wounds” of slavery and the Civil War had not healed and the past had not “lost its power to sting and wound.”
The Boston Daily Traveler saw things quite differently. In an editorial entitled “An Unpardonable Insult,” the paper criticized the ceremony in Richmond for seeking to elevate Lee to “the same pedestal of honor and greatness” as George Washington. In blunt language, the paper contrasted the actions of these two native sons of Virginia, declaring that Washington would never “have engaged in a war for the destruction of the American Union in obedience to the action of Virginia,” as Lee did.
The Daily Traveler also noted an incident that was a premonition of things to come. At the ceremony, someone in the crowd placed a Confederate flag in the hands of a nearby statue of George Washington and “there it remained during the day” — similar to the “unpardonable insult” of a Confederate flag being carried into the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 by supporters of President Donald Trump seeking to violently prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.
I discovered an original of the 131-year-old Daily Traveler editorial among the papers of George S. Boutwell, a Massachusetts congressman who helped enact the 14th and 15th amendments in the 1860s guaranteeing political and civil equality to Blacks. After serving as treasury secretary for President Ulysses S. Grant, Boutwell was elected to the Senate, where he led an investigation of white supremacist violence in Mississippi. It’s little wonder that Boutwell would greatly sympathize with the sentiments of the Daily Traveler editorial.
By the time of the Lee statue dedication in 1890, it was apparent to Boutwell and the Daily Traveler that the proliferation of Confederate memorials was but a symbol of the victory of the Lost Cause campaign of the South in rehabilitating notions of white supremacy. The next several decades saw the spread of Jim Crow laws and the institutional racism, South and North, that has crippled our society well into the 21st century. Only now, sparked by the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests, is the United States beginning to seriously reckon with that legacy.
To give Richmond due credit, its city council made the decision in 2020 to remove and relocate all those Confederate memorials on Monument Avenue that were on city property. As the Lee statue is on property deeded by private citizens to the Commonwealth of Virginia, it is up to the state Supreme Court to decide its ultimate fate.
Whatever that decision may be, our national debate over the potency of white supremacist symbols will continue. Though it is certainly appropriate that Americans remember and respect all who fought and died in our great and terrible Civil War, had Lee and his Confederate flag been victorious, the United States today would be a very different place — if it existed at all.
Opinion | Richmond’s Lee statue, after 131 years, is an unpardonable insult - The Washington Post
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — A Confederate monument that helped spark a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been hoisted off its stone pedestal.
Work to remove the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee began early Saturday morning. Crews were also expected to take down a second Confederate monument.
Spectators by the dozens lined the blocks surrounding the park, and a cheer went up as the statue lifted off the pedestal.
There was a visible police presence, with streets blocked off to vehicular traffic by fencing and heavy trucks.
Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker gave a speech in front of reporters and observers as the crane neared the monument.
“Taking down this statue is one small step closer to the goal of helping Charlottesville, Virginia, and America, grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy Black people for economic gain,” Walker said.
The removal of the statue follows years of contention, community anguish and litigation. A long, winding legal fight coupled with changes in a state law that protected war memorials had held up the removal for years.
Saturday’s removal of a statue of Lee and another of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will come nearly four years after violence erupted at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally. Heather Heyer, a peaceful counterprotester, died in the violence, which sparked a national debate over racial equity, further inflamed by former President Donald Trump’s insistence that there was “blame on both sides.”
The city announced its plans to hoist away the statues Friday.
Only the statues, not their stone pedestals, will be removed Saturday. They will be taken down and stored in a secure location until the City Council makes a final decision about what should be done with them. Under state law, the city was required to solicit parties interested in taking the statues during an offer period that ended Thursday. It received 10 responses to its solicitation.
A coalition of activists commended the city for moving quickly to take the statues down after the offer period ended. As long as the statues “remain standing in our downtown public spaces, they signal that our community tolerated white supremacy and the Lost Cause these generals fought for,” the coalition called Take ’Em Down Cville said.
The most recent removal push focused on the Lee monument began in 2016, thanks in part to a petition started by a Black high school student, Zyahna Bryant. A lawsuit was quickly filed, putting the city’s plans on hold, and white supremacists seized on the issue.
“This is well overdue,” said Bryant, who's now a student at the University of Virginia. “No platform for white supremacy."
"No platform for racism. No platform for hate.”
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memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s polarizing presence has hung over Memphis since he moved here in 1852 — his legacy cemented by a giant statue that loomed over all who passed his gravesite in a popular park.
Defenders considered him a hero for his Civil War exploits. Detractors called him a violent racist and noted his early leadership role in the Ku Klux Klan.
Now the former slave trader's remains are set to be moved to a new Confederate museum in Columbia, Tennessee — another milestone in the effort to remove statues, monuments, and now the remains, of Confederate leaders from public spaces.
As workers prepared to dig up his grave earlier this month, a white man waved a rebel flag, sang “Dixie” and launched an expletive-laced tirade at Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer. Sawyer, who is Black, plucked Confederate flags off a chain-link fence surrounding the site as George Johnson paced behind her on a concrete platform.
When he cursed at her again, Sawyer replied: “It’s not your property,” and turned toward reporters gathered for the June 1 news conference.
Health Sciences Park, where Forrest and his wife had been buried for more than a century, was called Forrest Park until 2013, when the name was changed. The statue of the general on horseback was removed in 2017, after a campaign Sawyer helped lead.
Now, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have agreed to transport his remains to their National Confederate Museum at the historic Elm Springs estate in Columbia, 200 miles away.
The group's spokesman, Lee Millar, a distant cousin of Forrest, said the bodies of Forrest and his wife were in an undisclosed location until they can be moved to the museum.
“Memphis is not the town that Forrest grew up in,” he said. “It’s just deleting his history and forgetting about the past.”
Gradually, Forrest’s legacy has been dismantled in Memphis. Forrest traded slaves near the area where people of many races now come to eat, drink and watch ball games downtown. A short drive away is the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Many in majority-Black Memphis are eager to see Forrest gone. The park where his grave was located has been the site of protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. A music festival for Juneteenth, which marks the end of American slavery, is scheduled there this weekend.
“It’s like a burden has been lifted,” said Van D. Turner, a Black county commissioner who pushed for the Forrest statue removal. “It just gives us breath."
Elsewhere in Tennessee, activists and Democratic lawmakers have called for the removal of a bust of Forrest from the state Capitol in Nashville. At Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s recommendation, the Tennessee Historical Commission voted to take down the bust, but GOP legislators argued another commission’s vote is needed. No removal plans have been announced.
After amassing wealth in Memphis, Forrest joined the rebel cause. Wounded four times, he led lightning raids on supply lines and commanded troops at Shiloh, Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.
Jack Hurst, author of “Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography,” says Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general.
In April 1864, Forrest’s troops attacked Fort Pillow in northwest Tennessee and killed an estimated 200 to 300 Union soldiers, most of them Black. Forrest was later accused of massacring them as they tried to surrender.
Historians say he was an early Klan leader, though some Forrest supporters dispute that, saying he was offended by its growing penchant for violence.
The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved to the Health Sciences Park site in 1904, where his statue towered above passers-by walking to work or to the nearby University of Tennessee medical school until its 2017 removal.
“The statue was reprehensible and was offensive,” said Sawyer, who says she received threats for her activism in getting it taken down. “It wasn’t something I believed belonged in our city.”
In December 2017, Memphis sold Forrest Park to a newly created non-profit, Memphis Greenspace, led by Commissioner Turner. The sale to a private entity circumvented a state law prohibiting the removal of historical monuments from public areas.
On the night of Dec. 20, 2017, a crane removed the statue from its pedestal. The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, citing the state law, but a Nashville judge ruled against them.
Greenspace eventually gave the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a judge signed an agreement approved by Forrest’s relatives to send the couple's remains to the group's privately funded museum, where Civil War artifacts are displayed.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans paid for the disinterment, using contractors and volunteers, including Johnson, the man who confronted Sawyer.
A monument to Forrest at the museum likely will be installed outdoors, in a park setting, where Millar said the former Confederate general can rest in peace.
“There has been some vandalism, some spray paint, protests," Millar said of the park in Memphis. “The general wouldn’t be happy the way things are here.”
For Turner, the ouster of the Confederate monuments and Forrest’s remains is “undoing an injustice” in a city still dealing with King's assassination.
“I hope that it gives life to the city," Turner said, “and it lets the city know that we don’t have to allow our past to drag us down.”
___
AP writers Mark Humphrey in Columbia, Tennessee, and Jonathan Mattise in Nashville contributed.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Workers have removed the remains of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from a Tennessee park, officials said Friday, marking another step in the process of moving their bodies out of Memphis and to a museum hundreds of miles away.
Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Lee Millar said the remains of the former slave trader and his wife were removed Monday and are being held in an undisclosed location until they can be transported later to the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs in Columbia.
Owned by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, the museum opened to the public in October. It is located about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Memphis.
The removal of the remains of the early Ku Klux Klan leader from Memphis, where he served as an alderman and traded slaves before joining the Confederate Army, would end a long-running dispute over his legacy and presence in the majority-Black city.
It is also another example of how cities and activists have taken steps in recent years to get rid of statues and monuments of historical figures who supported the South’s secession and led the fight against the North, from Gen. Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.
Crews arrived June 1 at Health Sciences Park to begin work on Forrest's tomb. The park used to bear the name of Forrest and feature a statue of the cavalryman on a horse, but the name has been changed and the statue removed in recent years.
With the approval of Forrest’s relatives, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is overseeing the move. A judge approved it late last year, ending a long legal battle.
The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved from a Memphis cemetery and buried under the statue of the former Memphis City Council member in 1904. The city took down the statue in December 2017 after selling the public park to a nonprofit group, thus circumventing a state law barring the removal of historic monuments from public areas.
A judge in Nashville ruled that the city and Memphis Greenspace, the nonprofit that made the park privately operated, removed the statue legally. The statue will also be moved to the Confederate museum in Columbia.
The park where Forrest was buried has been the site of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists have long called for the removal of both the statue and the remains. The words “Black Lives Matter” have been painted in yellow by activists on a walkway surrounding the tomb.
___
This story corrects the first paragraph to reflect that bodies were removed Monday and announced Friday.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14