Black activists of the 21st century are taking it beyond 'takin' it to the streets'
MEMPHIS -- For better than a century, he sat astride his horse on a bluff high above the Mississippi River.
He sat there as Model Ts trundled beneath, and biplanes carved the skies overhead. He sat there as the river rose and fell, as the stock market crashed, as local boys kissed their sweethearts and went off to war, never to return. He sat there as B.B. King taught Elvis Presley a few new licks in some Beale Street dive. He sat there as the shot rang out, and Martin Luther King was hammered down to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Nixon lied, Elvis died, the Internet rose, the towers fell, a newly elected president named Barack Obama exulted that “Change has come to America” and yet still, there he sat, unchanged.
He sat there so long that maybe people forgot to even notice the abhorrent absurdity of it, Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave trader, Confederate general, leader of a massacre of unarmed black people, early grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sitting on a bluff above a river in a city that is over 60 percent black. Or maybe they just saw it and sighed and accepted it as some immutable part of The Way Things Are.
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