Memphis renames 3 parks that honored Confederacy

The first part premiered 1/8/2013 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/abolitionists/

The story of how abolitionist allies William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimke turned a despised fringe movement against chattel slavery into a force that literally changed the nation.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2323777396/
kick

The series really showed what a slave nation the U.S. had become, and what it took to change its course.

That sounds like a deliberate recipe for ensuring that people will continue to use the old name. Much as New Yorkers for years (or are they still?) refused to refer to Sixth Avenue as Avenue of the Americas.

Can anybody explain the reason for the name? When I google on it, all I come up with in Memphis is a Baptist college.

with a campus in Memphis.

http://www.uthsc.edu/

Could be they are providing a grant/funding related to maintenance of the park...

let me point out that these bland, generic names are all temporary.

When the City Council started making overtures recently about changing the names of the parks, the Republican-dominated legislators in Nashville drafted a 2-page emergency bill to prevent (paraphrasing) any park representing a war or war figure from being changed or renamed.

http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/108/Bill/HB0553.pdf

So the Council met last night and passed the resolution in a hurry to change the names to non-war figures, effectively neutering the bill. Now they can slow down and take their time and give them proper names.

As with anything Memphis, the whole thing just reeks of racism. The folks who romanticize the Confederacy are venting their spleens all over the various comment boards. Well, the ones who can write, anyway.

Very interesting issue...

are starting to really insert themselves in the business of Memphis. You basically have Shelby County, which is largely Memphis, and it is dominated by Democrats, many of whom are African-American. Then you have the rest of the state. Don't get me wrong, there are pockets of Democrats here and there, but by and large it's Memphis vs. the rest of the state.

The City of Memphis recently surrendered their school charter in order to have it absorbed into the county. The outer regions of Shelby County were moving chess pieces behind the scenes to develop suburban school districts which would by and large be white, and they were trying to freeze the AAs out. State Republicans, none of whom live in Memphis or Shelby County, wrote some crazy bill to try to head off Memphis' proposed school system dissolution, so Memphis just surrendered the charter before they could ram it through, effectively forcing the merger. It's still tied up in court.

The state wants to punish Democrats in Shelby County, and they *really* want to punish African Americans. This place is so steeped in racism. It is truly unbelievable. It was bad enough when they would just keep from diverting funds this way, but when they actively tried to tell Memphis they couldn't change the names of their own parks, even the white city councilmen said "that's enough." The vote last night to rename the parks was 9 yeas and 3 abstentions.

One usually thinks of cities as more liberal than rural areas, and this is also true in NY, where I am. NY may be a blue state, but that's because of NYC. Upstate tends to be more Republican and I live in a largely Republican area. Most of the local offices tend to be decided in the Republican primaries. *sigh*

We finally voted in a great Democratic congresswoman in 2006 (got to see President Clinton when he campaigned for her! ), Kirsten Gillibrand, who's now senator. But after she left, we had her hand-picked Democratic successor (who I worked for) for one and a half terms, until he was defeated by a teabagger.

I'm interested in Tennessee since my grandmother retired to Western NC, so I've spent a lot of time there, and my cousin moved to Eastern Tennessee (Dandridge, Jefferson County) a few years back when she married a really great guy who originally came from there. Over time, I've seen her views changing, have gotten e-mails from her advocating prayer in schools, so I've wondered.

The Republicans, and not just in Tennessee, have really become proactive in suppressing the Democratic vote, targeting poor and mostly black areas which tend to vote Democratic, and don't seem to care who knows it. Sounds like the Republicans are now targeting Memphis. Glad to hear that the locals are fighting back, but we've seen (Wisconsin, Florida) that they can be incredibly persistent.

Thanks for all the details, since you have a front row seat, just wish that most voters were as aware as you are, but my work for my former congressman taught me that few are. I went door-to-door and made GOTV calls and we have a lot of one-issue voters (guns, abortion, DADT) here, too. I just hope I was able to educate a few...

the challenges they face, and so on. Some things are universal no matter where you are.

I would caution you about TN. As you can see from your cousin, the pervasive RW noise just wears some people down. We (the collective "we," certainly not me) just voted in a Republican supermajority in the legislature and they are absolutely wreaking havoc here. They are setting us back decades with their boneheaded, backwards nonsense. They cling to their outdated and incorrect beliefs like my children used to cling to their plastic toys at bedtime. When I am done caring for an aged parent, my wife and I are in agreement that we are going to scoop up our kids and flee this place.

Small enough for them to hold in their hands as they bludgeon you into submission.