Confederate statues context and discussion.

     When looking at the recent removals of Confederate statues in Memphis, it becomes important to look at the context of how they were built. For thirty years after the Civil War, there were no memorials set up in the city of Memphis. In 1899, Forrest Park becomes the first area in Memphis named after a Confederate figure, located on Union and Manassas. Around the same time, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s remains were moved to Forrest Park in 1904, with a statue built of his likeness in 1905. There needs to be context around these events, as the beginning of the 20th century was a time when the glorification of the Confederacy was starting to rise, with the “Lost Cause” narrative becoming commonplace in southern culture and in education. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy was most popularized by the 1881 book The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, written by former Confederate President Jefferson Davis. These types of book’s glorified the Confederacy and taught a new generation that they fought a noble war that should be celebrated. White supremacy went together perfectly with this ideology and the fact that the beginning of the 1900’s was a heavily racist time in Memphis. The issue of Confederate statues laid dormant until the 1950’s and 1960’s when the Civil Rights movement was in full force and Nathan Bedford Forrest and other Confederate soldiers were beginning to be portrayed in a negative light(Poe 2017). Boss E.H. Crump approved the statue of Jefferson Davis in 1954, shorty before he died in October of that year. While the statue did not get much news coverage at the time, it clearly was being built in order to glorify white supremacy and to combat the strides that the Civil Rights movement was beginning to make in the late 1950’s. The statue eventually raised all of its needed funds by 1964 and was completed by the beginning of 1965. While these details might seem small in nature, the context that both statues were built at a time of strong racial tension and sentiments in Memphis, shows that they were built to glorify the figures and also the Confederacy. 

It was not until the late 1980’s that the local Memphis chapter of the NAACP started an effort to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue and only after the University of Memphis wanted to have a ceremony around there adoption of Forrest Park(Poe 2017). The fight over the Confederate statues continued into the 1990’s as the Memphis City Center Commission voted against removing the statues in 1995. Over the next decade there was much debate over renaming the park, with the removal off the statues not even really being on the radar. The argument become over the names of Forrest Park, Confederate Park, and Jefferson Davis Park as individuals invoked in the effort found that a more doable cause. Complicating the issue, in 2009, The Sons of Confederate Veterans were able to add Forrest Park onto the list of the National Register of Historic Places. This was an attempt to make it almost impossible to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from the park. The Tennessee legislature introduced a bill in 2013 called "Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013”. The bill’s goal was to stop any name changes of Confederate figures in Tennessee, whether it be on a park, statue, or even school. This caused the Memphis City Council to quickly change the names of the three parks in Memphis to Memphis Park, Mississippi Park, and Health Sciences Park.. In August of 2015, the Memphis City Council voted 11-1 to remove the statue and Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave from the park. In 2016, the Tennessee Historical Commission blocked the removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue, using the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013 as its basis.. The bill was amended in 2016 to require a two-thirds majority vote by the Tennessee Historical Commission in order remove any statues or monuments, making it much harder at the time to remove the Forrest statue. In October of 2017, the Tennessee Historical Commission again voted against removing the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The issue has become even more complicated, as the city of Memphis is arguing that the statue removal should be under the 2013 version of the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act and not the 2016 version, which bars the removal of war memorials and statues. The city of Memphis would sell the two city parks in December of 2017 to private land owners for $1,000 to ensure the removal of the statues.