Memphis changes names of 3 Confederate-themed parks

[struggle4progress]

Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY9:57a.m. EST February 6, 2013
The measure was passed quickly to beat an effort by state lawmakers to block such moves.

The Memphis city council has hurriedly renamed three Confederate-themed parks, including one named after the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to head off an effort by some state legislators to block such name changes.

The council on Tuesday passed a resolution to immediately rename Confederate Park and Jefferson Davis Park in downtown Memphis and Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, which lies just a few miles away. The vote was 9-0 with three members abstaining ...

The "Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013" bill, already introduced in the state legislature, would prohibit name changes to any "statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, plaque, historic flag display,school, street, bridge,building, park preserve, or reserve which has been erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of, any historical military figure,historical military event, military organization, or military unit" on public property, according toThe Memphis Flyer.

The bill specifically included the "War Between the States," in its language, a reference to the view that the Civil War was fought between two separate countries ...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/06/memphis-parks-confederate-ku-klux-klan/1895549/

[Hoyt]

1. Smart move. Glad to see it.

Hard to believe someone would even say something like this: "Forrest is a misunderstood figure who was not a racist but a businessman who treated his slaves humanely and resigned from the Klan."

[struggle4progress]

2. In some circles, it seems, having been a slave trader, and a Confederate general, and the first

Grand Wizard of the KKK, are merely evidence of excess personality: such people, of course, sanitize his history and completely forget the massacre at Fort Pillow

... He was renowned for a terrifying temper that transformed him into something resembling a blood-engorged beast. He personally shot his own men if they tried to shirk a battle. He was given to duels and furious arguments, oversaw savage whippings of recalcitrant slaves, shaded the truth in his own behalf repeatedly, and once wrongly shot innocent "deserters" ...

... a Civil War newspaper account described whippings in which four slaves held the victim stretched out in the air while Forrest personally administered the bullwhip. Women were allegedly stripped naked and whipped with a leather thong dipped in salt water.

Such accounts were later backed up by former slaves who described terrifying brutality and the break-up of their families.

Forrest despised blacks who fought for the Union, and was accused by one Union general of personally shooting a captured free mulatto who was a servant of a Federal officer. A Confederate cavalryman once recounted how Forrest "cussed <him> out" for failing to execute a captured black Union soldier ... http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2004/winter/a-different-kind-of-hero

... Confederate forces under General Nathan B. Forrest captured Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, and proceeded to kill all the black troops within; some were burned or buried alive. A Federal congressional investigating committee subsequently verified that more than 300 blacks, including women and children, had been slain after the fort surrendered ... http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/214150/Fort-Pillow-Massacre