Margaret Renkl in the NY Times on the Removal of the Ugliest Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue

Margaret Renkl, the NY Times Contributing Writer focusing on the American South, writes today of visiting the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Nashville and on the removal of the infamous fiberglass statue of Forrest. Renkl writes:

Which brings us to December and the glorious defeat finally met by the most hideous monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest in all the land. You don’t have to take my word for this. It’s “The Worst Confederate Statue We’ve Ever Seen,” according to Mother Jones. New York magazine called it “America’s Ugliest Confederate Statue.” The Washington Post noted that the statue’s eyes have “an axe-murderer vibe.”

The malformed Confederate figure seated atop a malformed rearing horse was erected on private land in 1998 and surrounded by Confederate battle flags. Visible to anyone entering Nashville on I-65, the eyesore was a frequent target of vandalism. When someone splashed pink paint all over it in 2017, the owner, Bill Dorris, opted not to repair it because the new coat of paint, he said, would bring the statue even more attention.

Mr. Dorris died in late 2020. He left $5 million to his dog. He also left a small building and the flag display to the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Everything else, including the Forrest statue, goes to the Battle of Nashville Trust, a historic preservation group. Last month, the statue was removed unexpectedly. According to a statement from the trust, it was “ugly and a blight on Nashville” and detracted from their mission.

The glee at its fall was instant and widespread. “This has been a national embarrassment,” State Senator Heidi Campbell, a Democrat from Nashville, told The Tennessean. “I’m so excited. This is great news. It’s just so hurtful to people, not to mention it’s heinously ugly.”

Taking down offensive memorials isn’t the only way to begin to correct public representations of our heinous past. Some communities have responded to defenders of Confederate monuments by erecting competing memorials to those who fought to preserve the Union or to make it more just, especially during the civil rights era. In Nashville, the Metro Council voted last month to name the plaza in front of Historic Nashville Courthouse after the civil rights activist Diane Nash. A month earlier the school board voted to name a new high school after the Rev. James Lawson, a key organizer of nonviolent resistance in Nashville.

In October, the neighboring city of Franklin installed “March to Freedom,” a life-size monument to the United States Colored Troops, some 180,000 strong, who fought on behalf of the Union. The statue of one of those soldiers, a group that included many who had been enslaved, was erected on the same public square as a monument to an unnamed Confederate soldier set atop a towering pedestal that has long inspired furious debate.

The new statue stands in the same area where a slave market once stood. “You can hear all these romanticized, ‘Gone With the Wind’ stories of slavery, but here is the reality: Where you are standing, men, women, boys and girls were bought like cattle,” the Rev. Kevin Riggs told The Times at the monument’s unveiling. “This happened.”

The Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, passed in 2013, makes it nearly impossible to take down a Confederate monument here. Franklin’s “Fuller Story Project,” which includes five other historical markers chronicling the experience of enslaved people in Franklin, attempts to compensate. New monuments with the same aims are in the works or already stand in Boston; Natchez, Miss.; and Wilmington, N.C., among many others.

But memorials to the Black soldiers who fought to preserve the Union, necessary as they are, don’t obviate the need to remove memorials to white soldiers who fought to preserve slavery. And honoring the descendants of former slaves doesn’t eradicate a racist hatred that still festers and often erupts, these days, in full view of the public.

Sure, the act of taking down a memorial — like the act of putting one up — is largely symbolic. But such symbols are powerful reminders of what we treasure and what we repudiate. It is not too much to say that symbols tell us who we are.

So it matters that children growing up in Franklin, Tenn., can now visit a town square that acknowledges Black history and honors Black sacrifice. It matters that the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest are no longer interred in Memphis, where he fought to preserve vast plantations run on enslaved labor. “Having him there was like having him dance on our graves, the graves of our ancestors,” Memphis City Council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas told The Times.

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