Notes on an Imagined Plaque
This week's 99% Invisible podcast was originally produced for The Memory Palace podcast, and it's 15 minutes worth your time if you've been following the issue about taking down Confederate monuments. It's about imagining a plaque to place with a statue of CSA General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the text on the page gives you some background on him and the reasons why the statue was put up in 1905. tl;dr: He was a Confederate slave owner and said to be the first Grand Dragon of the KKK.
I haven't weighed in on the issue of taking down CSA statues, but I'm firmly in the camp of taking them down, especially ones on courthouse lawns. They were put there in the Jim Crow era to reinforce to the black community that whites were still in charge and blacks would receive no justice in a courthouse. That's their true history.
I'm saying this as someone who had family on the Confederate side of things (no slave owners, they were poor farmers), have multiple relatives named after Robert E. Lee (including one currently), and learned a few years ago that most of the males in one generation of my family were named after CSA and/or KKK people. My great-grandfather's first and middle names were Bedford Forrest, so this podcast hit really close to home.
I haven't weighed in on the issue of taking down CSA statues, but I'm firmly in the camp of taking them down, especially ones on courthouse lawns. They were put there in the Jim Crow era to reinforce to the black community that whites were still in charge and blacks would receive no justice in a courthouse. That's their true history.
I'm saying this as someone who had family on the Confederate side of things (no slave owners, they were poor farmers), have multiple relatives named after Robert E. Lee (including one currently), and learned a few years ago that most of the males in one generation of my family were named after CSA and/or KKK people. My great-grandfather's first and middle names were Bedford Forrest, so this podcast hit really close to home.