This is the most enlightening and discomfiting part of reading Edward E. Baptist’s book about slavery and the growth of American capitalism: how implicated the North is in the story. To be sure, far fewer enslaved people were brought to the Northern colonies, and yes, slavery was abolished in the North earlier than in the South. But still, Northern businessmen availed themselves of the profits of the slave system at every level and, in so doing, transformed the country into an industrial behemoth. Bankers, creditors, investors, speculators, and industrialists all had a vested interest in slavery’s perpetuation and expansion. Pointing out that most Northern Unionists opposed emancipation in the run-up to the Civil War, Baptist posits that white American power struggles in that era were “on one level not driven by a contest over ideals but [by] the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing.” That wealth flowed from the fields surrounding Selma into the bank vaults of New York, and the cotton traveled to the mills of Providence and Boston and, further inland, to Framingham (where my grandfather later worked while he completed the Towne genealogy). Northerners were distanced from the violence, from the inhumanity of the practice, but were implicated all the same. I’d been trudging through Alabama’s cemeteries, battlefields, and archives, but the history I was encountering wasn’t someone else’s, it was mine, too. The more I came to know Selma, the more I was coming to know the country, my family, myself.
To help me to understand what it was like to live in Selma, historian Alston Fitts asked me to imagine what it would be like to be reminded, every year on your birthday, of the worst thing you’d ever done. Up north, we’d rather pass the cranberry sauce, happy in forgetfulness. The distance afforded by the financial instruments of nineteenth-century capitalism persists to this day in Northern memory. It took my moving to Alabama and reporting this book to realize a hard truth about home, a place that suddenly felt both farther away and closer at hand.
Three
Monument Is Now Headless
March 12, 2012, was a typical day at work for Michael Pettaway, superintendent at Selma’s Old Live Oak Cemetery. He met his work crew that morning, and they set about tending one of the many paths that meander the grounds—regular Monday stuff, odd jobs maintaining the plots where the mausoleums loom and the Spanish moss hangs low. All typical, that is, until someone on his work crew asked, “Where’d the head go?”
Pettaway looked up, at a loss for what his employee was talking about until he, too, realized that the Forrest bust had vanished from the pedestal. No one could remember seeing it since the previous Friday. When I reached Pettaway a few years later, he explained to me that, back then, he was cautioned to avoid blowing gravel onto the pedestal, but he didn’t exactly make a habit out of looking at the statue every day. At some point over the weekend, though—the weekend that marked the forty-seventh anniversary of Bloody Sunday—someone had come to Confederate Memorial Circle and stolen the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from its eleven-year home.
monument is now headless read the headline in the next day’s paper.
Confederate Memorial Circle was now a crime scene. The image accompanying the newspaper article depicted an officer dusting the empty pedestal for prints. On closer inspection, eight holes remained where once securing bolts held the 400-pound bust in place, suggesting to Selma Police detectives that it was removed without the aid of a sledgehammer. Wherever the bust was, it was intact.
The Friends of Forrest first offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the statue’s return. When this bounty on Forrest’s head produced no leads, they upped it to $40,000. By the time I started looking into this story, it had been years since the theft, but even so, Pat Godwin was still fulminating about it. I reached her at home on the plot of land south of Selma she calls Fort Dixie, where she holds an annual celebration of Forrest’s birthday and where the answering machine informs callers that she and her husband can’t come to the phone because the genocide against Southern culture is still ongoing and they’re out there fighting. At the mention of the statue’s theft, Pat Godwin went on a tear, as if the statue had gone missing just a few days ago rather than several years. Godwin had always suspected Toure of being behind it. Toure denied the accusation, offering, in turn, to represent the thief for free.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Toure told me. “I wish I could have done it. I don’t have the strength.” I asked if she had a theory about who did. She replied that, for a while, she wondered if the Friends of Forrest had stolen it themselves—to raise money and attention—but eventually came to think that “some righteous Black people said this is sick and we’re not going to allow this statue to be on public property in the Black community. I truly believe that.”
An anonymous informant tipped off Selma police that local activist Sherrette Spicer had footage of the theft on her cell phone. Like Toure, Spicer hosted a radio show in Selma. She also led tours of visiting school children, taking them to civil rights landmarks such as the courthouse, the bridge, and the battlefield, and to the statue as well, “to give a cohesive view of everything,” she explained. In the months after it had vanished, the bust became a frequent topic of conversation on her radio show. She’d complain on air, tongue in cheek, about how she missed not being able to sit on him or take pictures of him during tours. But then rumors began to circulate that she was using the bust as an ashtray in her apartment above the Slavery Museum downtown. Officers came to her day job, at a call center in Montgomery, with a warrant and left with her phone.
In the meantime, the Friends of Forrest set about replacing the statue and, while they were at it, renovating the Circle. The plan that summer was to raise the Forrest pedestal to eleven feet, erect a wrought iron fence around it, and install lighting and twenty-four-hour camera surveillance. That summer, Todd Kiscaden, who lives in Tennessee, and his crew worked on the renovations on the Circle. In mid-August, they marooned the Circle’s central pillar to dig out a frame in which to pour a concrete ramp.
Or that was the plan, anyway, until Toure, her husband the longtime state senator Hank Sanders, their daughter Malika Sanders-Fortier, Sherrette Spicer, and some twenty other protesters marched into the cemetery. Though the statue’s move to the cemetery had been preferable to its original post at the Smitherman house, it still rankled. Selma, Spicer explained, is a city where lots of people walk to where they need to go and, because the cemetery bisects two neighborhoods, it gets a lot of foot traffic. “It’s one thing to walk through the cemetery, it’s another thing to have a statue of a Klan leader in it.”
“Here are these white people bold enough to come into a majority-Black community—on one side [of the cemetery] is public housing and, on another side, a middle-class community,” Toure said. That summer presented a tipping point: there was at present no monument to Forrest but a plan afoot to build an even bigger statue, and she realized she now had a only a small window of time in which to act. No way would Forrest come around again, not on her watch. “I was prepared to go to jail or do anything to stop it.”
Anything, that day in August, meant lying in the freshly dug trench that was about to be filled with concrete. Others threw shovels, turned over paving stones, and kicked dirt. The police arrived and shut down construction for the day while the protesters circled the central pillar, holding signs reading “I’m mad as hell and I ain’t going back,” and “KKK Mindset of Nathan B Forrest Killed Trayvon.” Toure vowed never to let the statue return. Kiscaden, furious, complained of losing nearly $600 in cement, while Godwin insisted that the protests were a distraction from the investigation into the missing statue.
Toure soon returned to Confederate Memorial Circle, this time to take pictures of the work site, hoping that her presence might provoke a reaction from the workers that might get them arrested. So Toure marched into the construction site as a crane was operating, tromping into the “hard hat area” without a hard hat. Kiscaden confronted her. Toure claimed that he shoved her, Kiscaden t
hat he was trying to move her away from the dangerous equipment. The spat led the chief of police to again shut down construction and Toure to press charges against Kiscaden.
Amid complaints from both prosecution and defense over who would hear the case, local judge Vaughan Russell stepped in.
“Both sides agreed that I would be acceptable,” Russell told me, as Pat Godwin was “someone that I get along with personally but not politically. I get along with Rose politically, but not personally.”
The case hinged on video footage Toure took before and during the altercation. While there was some evidence of Kiscaden confronting Toure, “There’s a duty on the part of the people to provide safety,” Russell said. More tellingly, however, (or, as Russell put it, “One of the most determinative pieces of evidence”) was the audio at the start of the video, in which Toure announced her intentions to provoke the construction workers and to have them jailed. So Russell found Kiscaden not guilty.
When I reached Russell at his law practice in downtown Selma, he was quick to register his exasperation with the strife over symbols in Selma.
Selma is one of the poorest cities in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation, he explained. “People come here from Washington to kiss the Blarney Stone, so to speak, but they don’t employ people . . . People will come and march but they won’t open a factory.” He feels like Selma has been scapegoated. Since the 1960s, the city’s name has become synonymous with racial violence and voter suppression, as if such attributes were unique only to Selma. And it’s this reputation, Russell says, that continues to contribute to the city’s economic malaise. Who would want to build a factory in a town with a past like that?, the logic goes. To Russell, these systemic issues make the debate over a statue in a cemetery seem frivolous. But to others, like Toure, the two are inextricably joined—the broader inequities make the statues all the more egregious.
“People don’t get the connection between the symbolism in that statute and the spirit that it represents,” Toure insisted. “The people who support those statues, those are the people on juries, those are the people in government, those are people who are police officers, those are the people who are sheriffs. It impacts who gets justice and who does not.”
And in a criminal justice system already racially skewed, such a symbol adds insult to an already grievous injury. The incarceration rate in Alabama has tripled since 1978 and more than half of those incarcerated in the state are African American. It is statistics such as these that led writer, lawyer, and civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander to famously declare mass incarceration to be the “new Jim Crow.” And it’s what keeps Toure doing pro bono legal work even though she ostensibly retired from law in 2011, as well as what keeps her committed to removing Confederate symbols. The Forrest statue, Toure explained, was an expression of that system; the system a continuation of the symbol. Same war, same general.
“This is what this culture does. You hear the stories of this unarmed Black man being shot in the back. But the stories every day of young Black men being traumatized, men illegally stopped and searched and accused of crimes, losing their dignity—these are the stories that are never told . . . Until we win that war against these statues of people who laid the foundations of white supremacy,” Toure emphasized, her voice rising in anger. “Until we expose and remove them, we will continue to have Black people marginalized in this country.”
And so the battle continued. The litigation, too. In 2012, Godwin attempted to bring charges against Toure for stealing wreaths from the cemetery; Toure sued Godwin for calling her a “domestic terrorist.”
On September 25, 2012, a group of fifty marched on City Hall to hand-deliver letters decrying the statue and to insist that the council intervene in the construction. The Friends of Forrest had undertaken renovations with the assumption that the Selma chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy owned the acre of land in Old Live Oak, per an 1877 agreement between the city council and the Ladies Memorial Association (a predecessor organization to the UDC). Toure’s husband, state senator Hank Sanders, argued that because the land transfer was not official, the Circle remained city property and thus within the ken of the city to regulate. Godwin, the UDC, and the Friends of Forrest remained adamant that the land was theirs. What did the deed to the land say? The city attorney couldn’t find it. So the city revoked KTK Mining’s work permit, “over questions about who owns the circle.”
But pulling the permit only muddied things further. Because the city council failed to give KTK Mining proper notice that they were deliberating on their work permit, it had thus denied them the opportunity to be heard on the matter. KTK Mining sued the city for violating their due process. It was, of all things, a Fourteenth Amendment issue in federal court that would decide Forrest’s fate.
In the meantime, police had managed to unlock Spicer’s phone and access its data. They found no footage of the statue’s theft. I found an email posted to a Confederate message board, purportedly from Pat Godwin, in which she updated her followers on the investigation, leaving no question about the dehumanizing nature of the statue replacement campaign:
Obviously, “somebody” must’ve tipped her off when the detectives left for Montgomery to seize her phone…sooooooo, she gave them “A phone”…. not necessarily “the phone”!!!! Guess ole Sherrette is smarter than the average monkey! The informants have been questioned again recently and they stand by their statement that they saw Sherrette Spicer holding the NBF bust AFTER it was taken from the cemetery….I smell a rat in Zimbabwe on de Alabamy!
Four
Deo Vindice
It’s no surprise that a decision on the ownership of Confederate Memorial Circle languished in federal court for over a year, because the one-acre plot has long been a proxy battle for the meaning of America’s past. Just a few rows up from Confederate Memorial Circle stands a statue of Elodie Todd Dawson. In contrapposto and a flowing gown, she holds a wreath in one hand, a Bible in the other. Her expression is ruminative, not quite serene. It was Dawson’s wish to be buried close to Confederate Memorial Circle, her postbellum passion project.
During the American Revolution, New Yorkers took down the statue of King George. After World War Two, Allied troops diligently removed Nazi symbolism from occupied Germany. After the Battle of Baghdad in 2003, American Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. But after the American Civil War, statues of the losers started to go up instead. Why? Elodie Todd Dawson’s work on Confederate Memorial Circle offers an answer.
After the war, Elodie Todd Dawson, like so many women in the South, took up the burden of carrying on. Death had come for one in five Confederate soldiers and for all three of Elodie’s brothers: one at Shiloh, one at Vicksburg, one outside Baton Rouge. Her sister Emilie lost her husband to a bullet at Chickamauga; sister Mary lost hers to a bullet at Ford’s Theater in the nation’s capital. Husband Nathaniel made it home to Elodie and to their two-year-old son, but war tempered his ego; the emancipation of the fifty-three men and women they enslaved shrank his fortune. He wrote in a letter of “[h]ow little we should value public applause . . . It is [as evaporative] as water and the longer I live the less inclined I am to be influenced by it.”
But Elodie’s grief moved outward. She sought to make sense of the loss by enlisting as a foot soldier for the Lost Cause, the campaign of revisionist history that glorified the Confederate soldier as a gallant knight who fought to protect his unimpeachable Southern way of life. By emphasizing the valor of the soldier, the tragedy of his death, white Southerners sidestepped the thornier questions of slavery and white supremacy as the Confederacy’s raison d’être.
Instead, cemeteries like Old Live Oak became ground zero for the magical thinking of the Lost Cause advocates, who emphasized the fact of the fighting, not its purpose or its consequence. Elodie Dawson became the first president of the Ladies Memorial Association in Selma. She requested and was granted an acre of land from Selma’s all-
white city council and duly established the Confederate Memorial Circle. It was her dying wish to be buried in sight of the Circle. Nathaniel obliged: He sent for seventy live oaks from Mobile and sent to Italy for a statue of her with a chain of flowers around her neck, a Bible in her hands. When it came in 1879, Dawson sent it back: The curls did not do his late wife justice.
And Elodie Todd Dawson was not alone in her eagerness to find grandeur in graves, as the inscription on a pillar in Confederate Memorial Circle reads. In his book Race and Reunion, David Blight reads the Reconstruction era as, “The story of how the American culture of romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory.” Groups such as hers captained the campaign to refer to the war as the “war between the States.” They wrote textbook curricula, sponsored essay contests, and erected monuments to the fallen Confederate soldier. As Blight writes, “In all their efforts the UDC planted a white supremacist vision of the Lost Cause deeper into the nation’s historical imagination than perhaps any other association.” To borrow George Orwell’s formula, the UDC’s success at controlling the past meant they controlled the future: now our present. The war might have led to Emancipation, but the narrative of racial difference used to justify slavery carried on. Mary Singleton Slack, a UDC leader in Kentucky, said in a Decoration Day speech in 1904, “thought is power” and urged the UDC to build “the greatest of all monuments, a thought monument.”
And they succeeded. So when the student teacher in my ninth-grade history class launched the Civil War unit with the claim that the war was fought over states’ rights, he rode a ripple cast by Elodie Todd Dawson’s stone up to Central Pennsylvania to hoist one more thought monument.
Down Along with That Devil's Bones Page 5
