Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  But Old Live Oak also holds a counternarrative to Selma’s Reconstruction, though its marker lay buried and obscured until the mid-1980s. It’s the story of Benjamin Turner, born into slavery near Weldon, North Carolina, in 1825. Five years later, his master, Elizabeth Turner, a widow, left Weldon for Selma. Benjamin Turner came of age in the city, and covertly learned to read and write by following the education of Turner’s children. In 1845, Elizabeth Turner sold control of him to W. H. Gee, a hotel and stable owner. Turner managed both for Gee, who gave him a meager portion of the profits, which he saved. After the war, Turner bought a parcel of land, taught in the first Freedmen’s School, and served as the Dallas County tax collector in 1867.

  Selma lay in the third of five military districts in the South, occupied by federal troops overseeing the Southern states’ reentry to the Union during Reconstruction. Major J. B. Houston, provost marshal of the Selma Freedmen’s Bureau—the underfunded, overstretched federal program that oversaw everything from education to voting rights for those formerly enslaved living in the South—reported more than ten instances of white on Black violence in August 1865 alone, while noting that these events were “but a small part of those that have actually been perpetrated.” Between the end of Reconstruction and the outbreak of World War II, nineteen racial terror lynchings would take place in Dallas County, one of the highest totals of the Jim Crow era. Yet the formerly enslaved persisted, organized, and asserted their rights. Having decided that the education being provided by white Northerners was not up to par, Turner helped to organize and found the Freedmen’s School, in the basement of First Baptist Church on Selma’s East End. Such institutions became, as Dr. Carroll Van West notes in his survey of Selma’s historic places, “the first steps to asserting their place not only within the society but also within the actual physical landscape of the town.”

  In 1870, Turner was elected to the House of Representatives, representing Alabama’s First District as the first Black Alabamian in Congress. You can see him in a famous lithograph made by Currier and Ives that depicts seven newly elected Black congressmen—he’s second from the left, with a full beard and a stern expression. While in Washington, Turner advocated for reparations and for desegregated schools—one of the first to do so in the US Congress. But he also advocated for leniency toward former Confederates, to restore their legal and political rights. Congress ignored all three proposed bills (though the next Congress would reenfranchise all former Confederates who took an oath of loyalty to the Union). Turner, however, did manage to secure legislation giving military pensions to Black soldiers.

  That lithograph is a stirring reminder that it didn’t have to be this way. That America could have been a different country and that, briefly, we were. During those few years after the war, the country actively vested and protected the citizenship of Black Americans. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, Black officials elected, and a pluralistic society—rather than one predicated on white supremacy—seemed possible.

  Instead, Turner lost the Republican primary election in 1872, and the last of his colleagues in that lithograph left office in 1877. The next Black congressman from Alabama wouldn’t take office for another century. Turner returned to Selma and to farming, but lost his business to the down economy at the end of the decade. Though he served as an election official throughout the two decades after leaving Congress, he died penniless on his farm outside Selma in 1894.

  Nathaniel Dawson had written often of his hope that having married a Todd sister would “save me the trouble of being hanged,” but Reconstruction went much easier on former Confederates than Dawson anticipated. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, local dens of the Ku Klux Klan, helmed by their Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, targeted prominent freedmen and Republicans with vigilante violence and intimidation in an effort to deliver the South back to Democratic, white-supremacist rule. “From 1866 through 1871, men calling themselves ‘Ku-Klux’ killed hundreds of Black Southerners and their white supporters, sexually molested hundreds of Black women and men, drove thousands of Black families from their homes and thousands of Black men and women from their employment, and appropriated land, crops, guns, livestock, and food from Black Southerners on a massive scale,” Elaine Frantz Parsons writes in her early history of the Klan. With white power restored and with no gallows to fret over, Dawson headed north to serve as President Grover Cleveland’s Commissioner of the Bureau of Education.

  In 1901, seven years after Turner’s death, Alabamians gathered in Constitutional convention, their explicit purpose, as convention president John Knox put it: “To establish white supremacy in this state. This is our problem, and we should be permitted to deal with it, unobstructed by outside influences.” Votes to ratify the new constitution were close in all counties but the Black Belt, which, oddly, voted overwhelmingly for it, suggesting to some historians that either the counties fixed the vote or perhaps refused to hold an election at all. The new constitution imposed poll taxes, property requirements, tests of literacy and constitutional knowledge, and other barriers to the franchise, which dropped the statewide number of Black registered voters from more than 180,000 to less than 4,000, and in Dallas county, from 9,871 to 152—the latter a number that hardly wavered until the passage of the Voting Rights Act more than sixty years later. Such tests, of course, might have disqualified poor illiterate white Alabamians if not for a clause that permitted those descendants of veterans to register. Deo Vindice, indeed.

  In the mid-1980s, Selma historian Alston Fitts identified Turner’s grave in Old Live Oak and worked to raise funds for a proper monument for Alabama’s first Black congressman. He recalled the pushback he faced during his campaign to publicly commemorate Turner, telling me that when he mentioned the project to a member of the Chamber of Commerce, she responded, “We try and focus on the more positive aspects of Selma history.”

  “Oh, like what?” he asked.

  “Like when the Yankees burned the town.”

  Five

  From Civil War to Civil Rights

  In October of 2013, US District Judge Kristi Dubose ruled in favor of KTK Mining and ordered the city to settle with the group. To resolve the issue, as per Judge Dubose’s ruling, the City Council would first have to decide who owned the land before they could decide what might happen on it. A month later, the council proposed terms. Arguing that it would be cheaper in the long run to settle, they proposed to deed the acre to the UDC and pay KTK Mining $100,000—a third of the amount for which they had sued. Further: the Friends of Forrest could replace the bust, but it could not be further elevated or illuminated. Three times Toure tried to speak and three times she was told she was out of order. Finally, council president Corey Bowie had her removed and arrested, and Toure spent the night in the Dallas County jail.

  At a council meeting the following January, ahead of the vote to finalize the agreement and officially deed the acre to the UDC, a group of activists including Toure began singing in the chamber. Police removed the protesters. From the lobby they sang and chanted and beat the doors as the council voted 5–4 in favor of the agreement.

  But Sherrette Spicer stayed behind. “Rosa Park-ing on their ass,” as she described it to me.

  When Spicer started to tell me this story, she paused, then backed up: “Let me set the scene for you.” But instead of describing the atmosphere in the room, the under-the-breath side conversations of the activists about to march out, or what was going through her head as she prepared to do whatever she was about to do, she described for me the city’s logo, which hung behind the city councilors. “From Civil War to Civil Rights and Beyond,” its motto reads, circling an image of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and a Greek-revival mansion.

  Then Spicer stood.

  “You’re fired,” she yelled as she approached the front of the room.

  As the Selma Times-Journal reported, “Spicer ran behind the council’s desk and yelled into the audience, likening the
decision to the Ku Klux Klan.” She threw down chairs and tables to block city police from reaching her before she could get to the podium and say to their faces that they need to revote.

  “Shame on you,” she called as police tackled her on the steps leading up to the councilors’ seats.

  So: from the Civil War to civil rights and beyond. “We ain’t got to the beyond yet,” Spicer explained.

  Spicer’s story brought a line from Alston Fitts to mind again, about how Selma had more history than it knew what to do with. I realized, though, listening to Spicer’s story, that it was less about having too much history and more about coming to terms with the consequences of it—a task that Selma, like the country at large, struggles to do.

  After the council’s vote, the Friends of Forrest got back to work. A year later, with more history than we know what to do with, I first wandered into Confederate Memorial Circle on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Soon after, Forrest came around again, followed then by Dylann Roof.

  In the invitation to the replacement statue’s unveiling, Pat Godwin wrote, “This will be a huge monumental historical event—the most paramount Confederate accomplishment throughout the South in recent times because we beat the enemy in their own territory, the Civil Rights hotspot of the world!” Though most white people have left Selma, its status as a symbolic city—“enemy territory” as Godwin put it—remains, not despite the white flight, but because of it. With the bust, the Friends of Forrest laid siege on the symbolic city from afar. They no longer want to live there, but still want to exert power over it, control its history.

  And with the circle secured, they wanted to hold on to the story, too. Todd Kiscaden never returned my phone calls. Cecil Williamson, a board member of the Friends of Forrest and a city council member during the debates in 2012, likewise let his phone ring. When I stopped by the auto-body shop run by Benny Austin, the spokesman for the Friends of Forrest, he told me that he wasn’t going to talk to me, that he wasn’t going to open that scab. “But you put the statue up,” I started to say, but he had already retreated to the back of the shop. I spoke with Pat Godwin several times on the phone and each time arranged for an in-person interview, only for her to cancel at the last minute. Finally, she wrote to say that she had discussed the matter with the Friends of Forrest board and they’d decided that they “won’t give interviews toward a project that we would have no control over the finished product.” She was sorry, she said, but she thought it best “for the integrity of ‘our’ own story.” Deo vindice, I guess.

  A few months after the statue’s rededication, in the summer of 2015, I headed to Selma to see the new Forrest bust for the first time. The granite pedestal was taller than I’d remembered, its base coming almost to my head (though its seeming taller may have had something to do with the fact that there was now a bust on top). Anyway, it looms. Looking at the statue from a few feet away—with the requisite, if only slight, crane of your neck to meet the statue’s gaze—forces you into a position of fealty, which I suppose is the point. It was evening, the waning light diffuse behind low cloud cover, casting no shadow. Everything was saturated—matte and flat and color-true. It’s the kind of light I’ve only seen in the American southeast; the kind of light that makes William Eggleston’s photographs so distinct—doleful and arresting. The dark bronze whorls of Forrest’s face glowed, almost. Up close, I could see the reproduction of Forrest’s signature carved under his general’s jacket. I resisted the urge to touch the points of his slicked-back hair, to see if they were sharp.

  I was out there that evening in a Confederate cemetery because I had decided to use these Forrest monuments as a way of organizing the past, to make sense of the present, and as it was becoming clear, to make sense of myself. I was there because there isn’t a Forrest statue in, say, Lancaster—just the burnt pylons in the Susquehanna that let me think I had avoided being implicated. And I admit that when I started coming to Selma, I thought of the city in terms not so far from what Vaughan Russell described as the folks who come to kiss the Blarney Stone. The city existed for me as it does in the national imagination as “Selma,” a repository of violence and grainy history. But I’ve since come to think of it more as a stage for America’s dramas and anxieties.

  Generals Wilson and Forrest came to Selma in 1865 because the city was a major arsenal of the Confederacy. It equipped the defense of the institution that enslaved people to work the surrounding farmland in order to line the nation’s pockets, from Selma’s Commercial Bank of Alabama to the textile mills of Massachusetts. One hundred years after Forrest lost the first battle of Selma, Dr. King chose the city as a place to stage the civil rights movement’s campaign for voting rights because it had so thoroughly rejected the outcome of the Civil War and could thus dramatize in stark terms the consequences, paid by the country at large, of our larger national rejection of that outcome. Spoiling for a second battle of Selma, the city’s white people violently defended a white power structure that existed, albeit in less stark terms, throughout the country. The violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge provided the political theater necessary to pass federal legislation, after all. Selma’s 1990 school resegregation was particularly dramatic, yes, but school integration efforts in the United States peaked in 1988. Then white folks beat the dusty trail to suburbs the country over. Likewise, it is hard to survey the backlash to James Perkins, Jr.’s election, from the vantage point of the present day, without feeling like it presaged the nation’s reaction to Obama’s presidency. And Selma, in its battle over a Confederate monument, once more served as a bellwether. Selma’s stories are more American than we often like to think—more representative than aberrant.

  So Selma hasn’t gone from the Civil War to civil rights and beyond, but, really, where in America have we? The lie of racial difference that was used to justify slavery persisted long after its abolition. After the war, embodiments of the lie emerged in the North as well as the South: lynching, red-lining, mass incarceration, to name just a few. And the legislative victories of the civil rights movement could only partially address a lie so pernicious and persistent. Lerone Bennett, Jr., writing under a banner image of sneering sheriff’s deputies in Selma in Ebony’s August 1965 issue, reminds us that “There is no Negro problem. The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men’s skins, is a white problem.” And it is a problem that persists. The “beyond” remains a mythical place where the color of your skin is not the predictor of so many outcomes, from health, wealth, opportunity, and prison time.

  Still, a Forrest statue lost and found in the city that Pat Godwin calls the “Civil rights hotspot” makes the country’s unreconciled tension more visible. Reencountering American history through Selma’s prism is to see it in that evening’s light—stark, diffuse, the saturation turned way way up. So there I was, in the gloaming of one of the year’s longest days, staring into the bronze eyes of an ersatz Forrest bust, seeing not one city’s talisman to the unreconstructed, but rather the whole tragic farce of America’s sense, my own sense of history. Then I got back in my dusty old sedan and set off to chronicle the battles that Selma precipitated—the new fronts in the cold Civil War.

  Part Two

  Forrest in the Age of Confederate Reproduction

  Murfreesboro

  Six

  Laying Forrest Low

  They built the coffin from cardboard, the body from papier-­mâché, and at noon on a clear and cold November day, students at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, buried Nathan Bedford Forrest in effigy. On the lawn of the squat, two-story brick building, unremarkable save for the fact that it bears the general’s name, the group circled, held hands, and laid the body down.

  “It’s 2015,” one attendee said. “It’s time to bury him.”

  The group had marched from the student union, a half-mile across the sprawling campus, to the impromptu burial ground in front of Forrest Hall, the university�
��s ROTC building. Two students, serving as pallbearers, carried the black cardboard coffin. Inside was the papier-mâché cast of the general, wearing a gray Confederate jacket and a Ku Klux Klan hood.

  As they marched, they chanted:

  “Run, Forrest, run!”

  “Black lives matter!”

  “Change that name!”

  “It was a really brave, smart thing to do,” Elizabeth Catte, then a Ph.D. candidate in public history at MTSU, told me. Forrest Hall is in the middle of the 22,000-person campus, a stone’s throw from the registrar’s office and the on-campus Subway. The burial raised the stakes in a campaign started that summer to change the name of MTSU’s Forrest Hall, and was meant to galvanize support on campus. At the front of the march was Joshua Crutchfield, one of the leaders of the campaign. Crutchfield was then a masters candidate in history, studying activism in the Black church. Bookish and bearded, Crutchfield is a natural organizer, combining a deep knowledge of both history and political organizing with a contagious charisma.

  When the march reached the lawn of Forrest Hall, Dalton Winfree, an MTSU senior with glasses, a scruffy beard, and a flop of hair, opened the coffin and removed the puppetlike effigy. “Today we are having a burial of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” Winfree announced, “to send a message to the task force who refuses to acknowledge his racist past.”

  The task force to which Winfree referred had been convened by the school’s president, Sidney McPhee, to determine the appropriateness of the ROTC hall’s name. Derek Frisby, a global studies professor specializing in military history, would lead a group of sixteen students, faculty, alumni, and community members to debate and then recommend to President McPhee whether the university should change the name, leave the name alone, or leave the name with “added historical context.” McPhee had announced the task force back in August, in response to on-campus protests in the aftermath of the Charleston Nine murders, when students, professors, and community members demanded the university remove the name that they felt most clearly represented white supremacy.