“Hateful, unkind, un-Christian, and unfair,” is how Memphis legislators describe a bill passed by Tennessee’s GOP-majority legislature stripping funding from the city’s upcoming bicentennial celebration in retaliation for removing statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Read story here.
Davis presided over the Confederacy during the Civil War, and Forrest was a Confederate general whose army massacred black Union prisoners and after the war was the Ku Klux Klan’s first Imperial Wizard. Today, many African-Americans consider Forrest a terrorist for his founding role in an organization that terrorized and murdered blacks for over a hundred years.
Memphis has roughly the population of Seattle, but today is about two-thirds black. It is where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, when the city was more white than today. The removal of the statues was fiercely opposed by white “Southern heritage” types.
Photo: Bedford Forrest’s name is synonymous with the Ku Klux Klan.