Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  That fall, similar campaigns were being launched at campuses across the country. Students, from Southern state schools to Northern Ivies, were holding their administrators to account for their statues, symbols, and building names—taking such honorifics as indications of who belonged, whose histories were remembered, whose lives mattered. The murders in Charleston had sensitized many students to the values reflected by their campus landscape, and they found that American universities had much with which to reckon: histories of owning and selling enslaved people; campuses built with slave labor; buildings named for the intellectual defenders of slavery; active, and in many cases violent, resistance to integration; campus cultures still hostile to students of color. At Yale, this meant a campaign to rename Calhoun College—the residence hall named for John Calhoun, known as the intellectual architect of the Confederacy. At the University of North Carolina, this triggered protests to remove “Silent Sam”—an on-campus statue of a Confederate soldier. At the University of Missouri, this meant a campus-wide outcry over the administration’s tepid response to racist incidents on campus that included racial slurs smeared in feces on bathroom walls, leading a graduate student to stage a hunger strike and the football team to threaten to sit out upcoming games.

  And, at MTSU, this meant a reckoning with Forrest.

  Many in Murfreesboro see Forrest as their savior. This owes to a raid Forrest led in the summer of 1862, driving out Union occupiers from the town, saving several men from imminent execution, and returning the city to Confederate control (at least for five months, anyway, until the Battle of Stones River, a bloody affair in which the Union retook the city). Southern novelist and critic Andrew Lytle, in an admiring biography, dubs Forrest “the town’s deliverer.” And, as legend has it, a descendent of one of the men Forrest saved later donated land to the university. So, the Confederate logic went, no Forrest, no Middle Tennessee State.

  MTSU, a public university, is now the state’s second largest school, known for its audio production program, and students of color make up a third of the student body. But for almost as long as MTSU has been a school, it has been tangled up in Forrest. At various points in the school’s history, Forrest has appeared in bronze on the front of the student union, in ink and on horseback at the top of the school’s stationery, embodied as a mascot on the sidelines of the football field; and, as the Dean of Students Belt Keathley said when dedicating Forrest Hall in 1958, his spirit has always been close at hand. This adoration helps explain why, 138 years after he was first laid to rest in Memphis’s Elmwood Cemetery, it was necessary now to bury Forrest in effigy. Decades of protests led by students of color had gradually forced the university to shed most of its Forrest emblems. The 2015–2016 campaign took aim at his last symbolic outpost: Forrest Hall.

  The task force had until that April to make their recommendation, but should the group endorse a name change, it would only be the first handoff in a much longer relay. President McPhee would take that decision under consideration and, should he agree, he would then make his recommendation to the Tennessee Board of Regents, who oversee Middle Tennessee State. Then, should the Board of Regents likewise concur that the name should be changed, they would have to appeal to the Tennessee Historical Commission for approval to rechristen the ROTC building. That last procedural hurdle would come from the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, passed in 2013, which requires the state’s historical commission to sign off on any change to monuments on public property. The Heritage Protection Act (sometimes jokingly referred to by journalists in the state as the Nathan Bedford Forrest Protection Act) was passed as a rearguard response to the decision by the city of Memphis to rename Forrest Park earlier that year. Confederate memory was well fortified. State senator Bill Ketron (Republican, Murfreesboro; MTSU ’83) sponsored the Heritage Protection Act and would serve on the Forrest Hall task force. The first public forum would convene two weeks after the symbolic funeral; the task force would hear from all comers.

  The ensuing debate over Forrest’s life and legacy would turn on the same questions that were currently roiling schools and cities across the country: questions about racial equity, about whose memory matters, about what our symbols say about who we are and what we need. And the debates over these questions would reveal a deep rift in American life. As a prelude to this battle, the students laid his papier-mâché body low. Holding hands in a ring around the coffin, the protesters sang and chanted. When they dispersed, they left the body on the stoop of his hall.

  Seven

  We Have a Choice

  When I met Joshua Crutchfield to discuss his role in the campaign to rename Forrest Hall, he wore thick-framed glasses, an easy smile, and because he’d just come from helping his cousin move, stylish athleisure wear. Crutchfield grew up in Murfreesboro and still has family close by. He is the cofounder of the #blcktwitterstorians, a popular hashtag for activists and historians of color, and he speaks in a measured cadence that belies his spirited, and at times confrontational, organizing style. He told me that he wanted to take on Forrest because he wanted MTSU to be better, more equitable, and more accountable to its past—and because he has borne the weight of its failure to do so.

  “Bree Newsome was the spark for me,” he explained. The community organizer and activist who climbed the flagpole of the South Carolina Capitol to remove the Confederate flag two weeks after the Charleston Nine shooting made Crutchfield think the timing was right to get Forrest’s name taken down, too. He’d cut his teeth organizing with the Black Lives Matter chapter in Nashville and, in the summer of 2015, saw a potential opportunity for a groundswell of protests to rename the building at MTSU. “There’s always a small group of people holding things together until something big happens and you can draw more people to your effort,” Crutchfield explained. So he and a few other MTSU students began to organize a movement to change the name. They soon started a Facebook page and circulated a petition. It got upward of one thousand signatures in the first week. After the group’s first public protest that August, the school president, Dr. McPhee, announced that he would convene the task force.

  But the timeline and format of the process frustrated Crutchfield, who felt the matter was cut and dry: “We don’t think racism should be debated at this point,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to beg to be acknowledged or cared for.” The drawn-out format seemed intentional, an attempt to slow the campaign’s momentum. But, he felt, it also created a false equivalency—the equal time, “hear-both-sides” format suggesting that Forrest’s military accomplishments should be considered equal to his actions as a slave-trader and a Klansman. It was, in a word, “bullshit.” But even so, he said, “We committed to the process.” Crutchfield and his fellow organizers came up with a two-pronged strategy for how they would engage the deliberations. “If you participate in the meetings, you legitimize it. If you disrupt it, you say it’s bullshit,” he explained. They decided to do both.

  The first forum took place in December, a few weeks after the papier-mâché Forrest’s funeral, and the “Change the Name” group came out en masse, ready to participate in the spirit of the forums. The night was organized in a point–counterpoint format: People wishing to speak in favor of the name change could sign up in one column, those wishing to keep the name, in the other. Two minutes were allotted for a speaker wanting to keep the name, then two minutes for someone wanting it to change. Unsurprisingly, the atmosphere was tense.

  “There was lots of silence before the proceedings,” Mark Doyle, an MTSU history professor and member of the task force, told me, with “people eyeing each other nervously.” He likened the mood to a Trump rally.

  “The pro- and anti-Forrest camps break down predictably,” Doyle explained.

  The “Change the Name” coalition consisted primarily of students—mostly students of color, but not exclusively so—with the additional participation of some professors and community members. Their appeals worked past and present. They hit the big three strikes against F
orrest: slaver, Fort Pillow massacre, KKK. They weren’t trying to change history, they noted, which resides in the historical record. The question of honoring someone, however, is a different matter entirely. Heaping laurels on a man with Forrest’s record simply didn’t square with a public university claiming inclusivity.

  And white Southern history was not, in fact, the only history to consider.

  “When I see him I see what my enslaved ancestors went through,” one student testified.

  Crutchfield spoke toward the end of the first meeting and threw down the gauntlet: “We have a choice: Do Black lives matter or will we hold on to white supremacy?”

  Those in the pro-Forrest camp were mostly white, mostly older, mostly from the Murfreesboro community, not the university—representatives of the so-called Buckle of the Bible Belt. Their arguments outlined their fear of changing history, the history of their ancestors, whose heritage they valued. They recited the doctrine of Forrest apologia: That he was a daring commander; that he displayed admirable leadership qualities; that he was as a man of his time, a time when slavery was legal. Some testified that his presence on campus reflected their values and represented the community’s connection to the school. Former ROTC cadets fondly remembered rappelling off the building named for the general. Then, of course, there was the more general anti-political correctness debate that reliably attends such discussions. Don’t judge a historical figure by today’s PC standards, the line went. As one speaker put it: “I’m offended that you’re offended.”

  Elizabeth Coker, a local journalist and the proprietor of Nostalgic Nashville, a tour guide to Old South points of interest, testified that members of her family rode with Forrest and she refused to see that history diminished. When I spoke with Coker after the forums, she framed the debate as one of “town vs. gown”—a tension between MTSU and the local population. The university is changing. No longer a regional school, MTSU attracts a diverse group of students from across the state and across the country. That’s evidence to some that Forrest needs to go. But to others, the changing campus makes it more urgent that Forrest stay. Forrest, as Coker explained, represented a link to the past, to their past. Who were these outsiders to tell them otherwise? “I feel it is an intrusion on our culture and on our perspective on life,” Coker told me.

  Those wanting to change the name, she felt, did not understand General Forrest. Nor did they understand the connection, the respect, that people there feel for him. “It goes back so far into the school’s psyche,” she explained. It was all so personal. To protest Forrest, the town savior, was a protest against their home and history. In other words, a protest against them. “The younger generation has skipped all that history and just moved on to social justice.” And social justice, for Elizabeth Coker, wasn’t the point. Take white privilege, she said. “My grandmother had no concept about that during the Great Depression and I don’t think I ever have either, but I will say that I’m a very blessed person and I haven’t suffered near what generations before me has.” She pointed to the English and Irish settlers in Middle Tennessee fleeing persecution in Europe, then to the white Southerners after the war, facing starvation and the destruction of their land and the upheaval of their society, then to the deprivation of the Great Depression. Life hasn’t been easy on her people, she feels, and then here come these social-justice kids begrudging her her heroes? She wouldn’t stand for it. Forrest—Tennessee’s legendary soldier, in her estimation—was worth defending, regardless of the outcome (or the meaning) of the war he fought. “Losers in history are not necessarily losers. You might lose the battle and you might even lose the war. But history usually will bear out the truth of what was a righteous cause.”

  For the second forum, held in February 2016 at a community center west of campus, the “Change the Name” group revised their approach. Sheriff’s deputies, there for security at the off-campus event, stood along the walls, hands on hips and holsters. There were reports of intimidation in the crowd. Pat Godwin made the trip up I-65 from Selma to speak, calling attention to the thousands of Mexicans crossing the US southern border while they were there, wringing hands about political correctness.

  An hour into the forum, Brandon Woodruff took the microphone. Woodruff, that year’s homecoming king and a member of a group of Black student leaders known as the Talented Tenth, wore a white turtleneck sweater and a look of firm resolve. An alumni speaking a few turns before Woodruff had threatened to pull his donation from the school should they change the name. Woodruff promised much worse: a third of the student body—the approximate percentage of students of color on campus—rising up against the administration in revolt. The administration, Woodruff said, had consistently overlooked and ignored the experiences of people of color, but they would not be ignored any longer. “We will fight until hell freezes over,” he said, “and then we will fight on the ice.”

  He replaced the microphone in the stand, took his seat, and joined a crowd of students in a chant of “Change the damn name!”

  Then Crutchfield stepped into the aisle and led a group of students in a recitation of Assata Shakur’s rallying call: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” A sheriff’s deputy then shepherded him out of the room, to the chants of “Black lives matter.” A dozen more students followed, heading for the center aisle, their fists raised, pumping their arms with every syllable. People stiffened in their chairs. The forum ground to a halt. A deputy approached Derek Frisby, the chair of the task force, wanting to end the event then and there, but Frisby declined. They waited. The students’ muffled chants filtered into the room. People exchanged hesitant looks, coughed, fidgeted. Finally, the meeting resumed, but the tenor had changed. The seats once occupied by the students remained conspicuously empty.

  I spoke with Dr. Frisby a few months after the task force had made their final recommendation. Frisby wore the familiar uniform of a college professor: light-blue button-down shirt, khakis, high-mileage sneakers. On his bookshelf stood figurine soldiers squared off in miniature battle. During our conversation, Frisby described what it was like to chair a conversation on one of America’s oldest unresolved arguments. “There’s no way to talk about Forrest objectively,” he told me, he was just too controversial. He conceded that maybe there could have been a better way to organize the forums than the “tit-for-tat” format but, even after many sleepless nights, he hadn’t thought of one. Forrest was a historical trip wire pulled tight by the tensions of the present, and for Frisby the forums became a microcosm of a broader us-versus-them political climate. “Everyone was already polarized,” he explained. In his view, both camps thought the debate was preposterous, the answer was obvious, and the process was rigged against them.

  Like Elizabeth Coker, Dr. Frisby pointed to a generational gap to account for the divide. Frisby had grown up in Murfreesboro, attended MTSU, and teaches in Forrest Hall. He saw the decision to name the building after Forrest as an attempt to connect the school to the community. And he appreciated the gesture. But, he acknowledged, the school has changed, that connection has frayed, and he allowed that there were figures other than Forrest the school might honor. Still, he had hoped that the debate would be a learning experience for the students.

  Instead, it only wore on them, Joshua Crutchfield told me. The debates and forums and online arguments drained them physically and emotionally. Because the school’s administration had tried to carve out a neutral stance on Forrest, the burden of outlining his full history and testifying to the dehumanizing effects of it fell to the students, who were told repeatedly, on their own campus, that they were dumb, that they were wasting their time, that if only they knew their history, they would come to admire the man. It seemed to Crutchfield that the students were working harder to better the school than the school was to better them. He found those months of debate depressing, heavy. They were asking members of their community to acknowled
ge a point of view outside their own, and for it they were mocked. The county historian, Greg Tucker, even wrote a letter in support of keeping the name, claiming that the students, in making this debate about race, were letting Martin Luther King down.

  One of the members of the task force, history professor Mark Doyle, decried this pushback in an open letter. Titled “To the White People Who Publicly Opposed the Renaming of MTSU’s Nathan Bedford Forrest Hall,” Doyle diagnosed a misguided belief in “The True History.” He wrote: “You feared that the True History of Nathan Bedford Forrest was being distorted or hijacked by people without a valid claim to the story, such as you have. Newcomers and dilettantes were grabbing the Facts of History and twisting them to their own selfish purposes.” He invited his readers to consider the fact that students like Crutchfield “were saying that your True History is not a divinely sanctioned absolute, but simply a story about the past that helps you make sense of the present, and that this, far from being a perversion of history, is what history actually is.” Those who want to change the name, he wrote, “are people who resent white people continuing to claim ownership of their stories, their bodies, and the manner in which they engage with the world as they find it.”

  After that second forum, Crutchfield returned home exhausted. But, ever the student of history, he unwound by reading. He’d come across a new article published by an author he admired, the historian Robin D.G. Kelley. The article questioned university protests led by Black students across the country. “I want to think about what it means for Black students to seek love from an institution incapable of loving them,” Kelley writes in the essay. It was like Kelley was writing directly to Crutchfield. Given the systemic prejudice the students were protesting, Kelley asked, why demand more access to such institutions? The article forced Crutchfield to rethink his motivation. What was he fighting for? he asked himself. At what table was he trying to get a seat? Did he even want to be at that table?