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MEMPHIS,
Tenn. — The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the Confederacy’s
favorite sons, stood in Forrest Park in Memphis, overlooking the busy
thoroughfare of Union Avenue for over a century. The bronze monument to
Forrest — cast in Paris at a cost of nearly $33,000 and weighing 9,500
pounds — was dedicated with great fanfare in his adopted hometown in
1905. Joining the statue were the remains of Forrest and his wife, which
had been moved from a local cemetery. For the white aristocracy of
Memphis who had raised the funds for his installation, it was a banner
day.
But
Forrest was not just a Confederate general revered for his equestrian
skill and battlefield acumen. Before the Civil War, Forrest was a slave
trader, making his fortune running the Negro Mart on Adams Street, which
sold “the best selected assortment of field hands, house slaves and
mechanics,” according to an old newspaper ad. During the war, he was one
of the South’s most celebrated soldiers but also was accused of leading
a massacre of Union troops, including many freed slaves, who had
surrendered at Fort Pillow, in Tennessee. “The poor deluded negroes
would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands
scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot
down,” said one Confederate sergeant of the attack.
Forrest, however, noted in his post-battle report that he hoped the
incident would remind the Union that “negro soldiers cannot cope with
Southerners.” (The extent of Forrest’s responsibility for the brutality
is still debated.)
After the war, Forrest was chosen as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan, leading the organization in the aftermath of the
Confederacy’s defeat.
His
statue’s presence was perceived as a daily affront by the majority
African-American city that was at the center of the civil rights
movement. In 2017, a movement to remove the statue that had been
frustrated for years found fresh momentum under new leaders, and City
Hall worked legal channels to circumvent a restrictive state law. To get
around the Tennessee Legislature, city officials quietly crafted a plan
to rid the city of the monument, a creative ploy that ironically echoed
the Southern resistance to civil rights laws decades ago. On a chilly
evening just before Christmas, the legal statue heist went down, and in
front of a small, hastily assembled crowd, Forrest fell, ending a
painful chapter in Memphis history. From the accounts of over a dozen of
those involved with the process, this is how it happened.
In
2015, after the slaying of nine people at a historic black church in
Charleston, S.C., a revolt against Confederate symbolism began to sweep
across the country. South Carolina stopped flying the Confederacy’s
battle flag above its state Capitol, and statues honoring the
secessionist movement and its heroes began to fall, often under the
cover of darkness in attempts to limit the impact of protesters who
sympathized with the iconography. Although officials in most cities had
the power to make decisions on the statues, any attempts by Memphis to
follow suit were blocked by the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act.
Passed in 2013 and modified in subsequent years by the heavily
Republican state Legislature, the law prevented local municipalities
from removing memorials on public property without applying for a waiver
through a complicated process that would likely end with rejection by
the state’s Historical Commission, whose members were appointed by the
Republican governor.
A marker honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest and the sons of Confederacy in Memphis. (Photo: Christopher Wilson/Yahoo News)
The
statue’s early existence was relatively uncontroversial, except for a
dispute over which direction it should face (some said Forrest facing
south made it seem like he was in retreat from the Union; others said he
should be looking upon his homeland; the sculptor said he should be
facing where he’d get the most sun) and complaints that oxidation had
turned the general green. Then vandalism began in the 1960s, with
Forrest’s saber being broken off repeatedly and eventually included
spray paint marking the base with “KKK,” “slave trader” and “racist
murderer” in 1994. Memphis parks were segregated until the Supreme Court
ordered them desegregated in 1963. A year later, a statue of former
Confederate President Jefferson Davis went up a mile and a half away,
joining other likenesses around the country as Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act.
“My
father grew up in Jim Crow-segregated Memphis, and he could not walk
through that park unless accompanied by a white person and he could not
sit down in the park as an African-American,” said Shelby County
Commissioner Van Turner.
“I
never understood as a kid growing up these are public parks yet they
display a monument of someone that was brutal to my ancestors,” said
City Council Chairman Berlin Boyd. “He sold them, and he was not the
type of image or man we should be portraying, especially in a city like
Memphis that is predominantly African-American.”
“We
could not go in that park and do what other citizens were able to do
because of segregation,” said the Rev. Lasimba Gray, 71, also a Memphis
native.
There
were petitions against the statues from civil rights groups in the
1970s and 1980s, but they never posed a serious threat. Gray and Shelby
County Commissioner Walter Bailey, 77, renewed the push to remove the
statues and rename the parks in 2005. Gray invited the Rev. Al Sharpton
to lead a rally in support of the movement, but gained little traction
with elected officials. Even some in the African-American community
regarded the group, as Gray tells it, as “troublemakers.”
The
legal wrangling from both sides picked up in 2013. Just before the
Heritage Protection Act was passed by the state Legislature, the City
Council voted to rename the parks — Forrest’s became “Health Sciences
Park” — a move that sparked a Klan rally in town. The issue arose again
in 2015 after the killings in Charleston, S.C. The City Council voted to
take down the Forrest statue but was blocked under the Heritage
Protection Act.
Enter
Tami Sawyer and Mayor Jim Strickland. Sawyer is a local activist who,
in May 2017, founded a group dedicated to the removal of the monuments:
Take ’Em Down 901, a reference to the city’s area code. Strickland is
the city’s first white mayor in 25 years, a Democratic city councilman
who won election in 2015. Sawyer collected signatures for a petition and
pressured City Hall, organizing rallies and presenting thousands of
names in support of the removal of the monument that she referred to as a
“source of oppression and hatred in Memphis.” Strickland, who voted to
rename the parks and tear down the statues as a City Council member and
called the Forrest statue “a monument to Jim Crow” as mayor, had his
team begin to look into a method to legally circumvent state law. City
Hall and activists were on the same side but did not work in tandem,
having what Sawyer called a “sour” relationship. City officials rejected
the solution proposed by Take ’Em Down 901 to ignore the law and just
pull down the statues. But both parties were instrumental in getting it
done.
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