on removing Forrest from TN's state capitol

Last week, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee agreed to discuss the removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest from our State Capitol Building in Nashville. Presumably, he did so reluctantly, and only after peaceful protestors lived in the plaza outside for a month, publicly asking him to talk with them about it. He did so after Mississippi voted to change their flag, and confederate monuments came down all over Florida, Alabama and Virginia. He did so after NASCAR banned the confederate Flag and played the Black National Anthem alongside the National Anthem.

Still, he did so. I am grateful. While our Governor decided this monument does not reflect Tennessee’s most honorable servants, our President protested such action this weekend in South Dakota. He claimed that those who remove Confederate monuments are erasing history, maligning American heroes, and shaming us all in the process. He vowed to stop such desecrating actions. I offer a revised essay today to provide context for this debate. I also offer it to encourage you to call your State Senator or Representative and voice your support of removing the bust of Forrest to another location. (While you are taking action, request an absentee ballot soon so you can vote in our local election August 5th.) Everything matters.

Confederate monuments were erected as a permanent public reminder of the Lost Cause, which revised the history of the South, making it a kind and loyal place, gently controlled by Christian men who protected their women and nurtured their slaves. Many of the organizations that funded the monument movement were openly founded on the Christian legitimacy of the South and on the supremacy of the white race (Indeed, the KKK was often present, holding Bibles, at the dedications of these monuments). We now find ourselves in a battle over this contested past. Many proponents of the Lost Cause, mostly white people who love their Southern heritage, are understandably frustrated that non-whites, liberal whites, or other protesters want to remove Confederate monuments, erasing history. They feel defensive, as if their entire legacy is being vilified and erased by people with no right to speak into Southern history. This viewpoint makes perfect sense if the only history of the South is the Lost Cause. 

However, most Southerners—of all races—do not know the full history of the South. They don’t know that most plantations were owned by absentee landlords, and were simply plots of land, worked by people under the lash of an overseer, with no “humanizing” white family nearby. They don’t know that Christianity and baptism were twisted and manipulated, finally shared with the enslaved only when evangelism could be used as a tool of coercion against the new converts. They don’t know that the vast majority of white people did not own people, and were victimized by a system that allowed huge plantations with a self-replicating work force to thrive while they struggled to get ahead. They don’t know that the institution of slavery fueled, funded and built every economic gain America experienced, and that America itself owes a deep debt of gratitude to the people of color who made America great and possible in the first place. They don’t know that statues of men who prioritized personal gain over loyalty to America were erected to honor a fabricated Southern legacy. This historical ignorance must be confronted in order to think clearly about the current Confederate monument debate.

Here are the two sides of this debate as I understand them:

For many, the Civil War and the Confederacy are part of our history, and the men who fought in the war were valiant warriors loyal to their families, fighting for the rights of those in their states. Honoring them has nothing to do with slavery, but instead commemorates the noble leaders who fought and died for their values in the bloodiest war America has ever known. They are part of our history, and should be remembered.

For others, the monuments of Confederate leaders honor men who betrayed their country through legislated mutiny, and then fought for the right of their fellow statesmen to own, abuse, and control every aspect of the lives of those they enslaved. For these folks, the antebellum South, the Confederacy, the flag, and the soldiers who fought for the states who seceded are all fruit of the poisoned tree of slavery. This past is fluid and invasive and one cannot pluck out part of the memory for honor when slavery was the reality that created the whole.

So what are we to do with this history? I do not think that we can praise every confederate honoree as an unblemished hero nor as a despicable tyrant who should be shunned. That said, we cannot pretend that this debate is about a choice to honor history when the statues themselves were created to manipulate history. America is a mixed bag; we are brave and free and fair, while also being cowardly and abusive and greedy. The idea that this debate has a side who wants to erase history (those in favor of removing monuments) and a side who wants to honor history (those who want to leave monuments as they stand) is problematic. The history memorialized by confederate statues is a history created after the Civil War to erase the evil of the everyday actions that established, paid for and built our country.  

As a Southern American, I agree that we cannot erase or ignore history by eliminating confederate statues. We have inherited a legacy of erasing and white washing the very histories of hierarchies based on race left to us by our ancestors, and this debate gives us a chance to reckon not only with our past, but with the ways we continue to remember and disremember that past. We are responsible, each of us, for what we do with the legacy left to us by our ancestors. For my part, I do see a place for confederate monuments in public life, under these conditions:

1) The monuments should be joined by other conflicted “heroes”, like enslaved people, slave rebellion leaders, abolitionists, and leaders who spoke truth to the power of white supremacy when it was dangerous to do so. (PSA: It still is dangerous to do so). The commemoration of others will create a robust dialogue about the role of individuals in promoting or confronting systems of injustice. America has a legacy of abusive oppression, but we also have a legacy of resistance and seeking justice for all. Let’s honor that legacy.

2) Existing monuments should be moved to museums or accurately contextualized with posted explanations. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brave confederate general AND a violent promoter of racial hatred as a slave trader and the Grand Wizard of the KKK. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence AND forced a young girl he owned to have sex with him, bearing several of his children, whom he freed while continually writing that interracial mixing was an abomination and abhorrent to God. Robert E. Lee was a tenacious general who believed slavery was “evil”, supported abolishing it, AND held racist views that slavery civilized Africans, pledging to kill soldiers who fought to abolish it. The question about moving statues to a museum instead of honoring them in public parks and State Assembly halls is not a question of who is willing to remember history; it is a question of who is willing to place these statues in the historical context in which the men they honor lived and died, rather than the manipulative context in which they were originally placed by white supremacists.  

Our history is neither all progress nor all degrading shame; we are and always have been mixed bags. We would do well to take an honest look at what our “heroes” accomplished on their best and worst days, allowing that knowledge to explain the legacy we all carry, and what we are to do with it today. The people around us notice who are heroes are because they indicate who we admire, what we value, and who we are hoping to become. For the sake of us all, we must do better than we have done. In Nashville, that means removing Nathan Bedford Forrest from our State Capitol.