Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  “I was like, ‘Okay, we have a movement,’” Sawyer said.

  Through the summer—“that long summer,” Sawyer laugh-groaned—the group began organizing under the hashtag #TakeEmDown901 (901 is the area code for Memphis), a reference to the New Orleans organizers, Take Em Down NOLA, who had maintained years of pressure on the city to remove their monuments. The hashtag helped coalesce online support while Sawyer slogged through July, seeing to all the unglamorous legwork a grassroots effort entails: She pushed the petition, collected and mailed statements of support to the members of the Historical Commission and the mayor, did local press spots to keep the issue percolating. During a television interview in front of the city’s Jefferson Davis statue, a group of Confederate sympathizers stood behind the camera waving a Confederate flag at her.

  “Take care of yourself,” one man said to her after the interview.

  “I stiffened, hearing a threat in his voice,” Sawyer wrote of the encounter in an op-ed in the Memphis Flyer. “For a moment, I felt the fear which they hope will keep us in a state of inaction.”

  Then, in the wake of the Unite the Right rally, former skeptics of the monument debate were finally ready to admit that there was a clear connection between the statues and white supremacist violence. Almost immediately, the ranks of Sawyer’s movement swelled. Students at the University of Tennessee medical school in Memphis walked out of class two days after the violence in Charlottesville, and they, too, rallied in the park. One of the medical students told the crowd that the Forrest statue is a “direct contradiction of the oath we all take as health-care professionals: do no harm.” Forrest, he said, is harmful to the city’s and to the school’s reputation. The next day, in what came to be known as the “arrest protest,” police wrestled with protesters who were trying to cover Forrest with a bedsheet, resulting in a surreal game of tug of war over the statue and with the arrest of seven people, one of whom was charged with “desecration of a venerated object.” Protesters surrounded the squad cars carrying those who had been arrested, banging on the hoods of the vehicles.

  The day after, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River where the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis stands, Sawyer encouraged the crowd to keep pushing. Public pressure on the city was crucial, she said. Like with Forrest Hall at MTSU, the city’s Confederate statues were safeguarded by the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act. So protesters, she said, had to force the issue. “The city knows what loopholes there are,” Sawyer promised.

  With attendance at their protests peaking, Sawyer’s group sent a letter to Memphis mayor Jim Strickland demanding the removal of the city’s Confederate monuments. They were done asking. “White supremacy is at an apex and must be halted nationally and here at home,” the letter read. “You said yourself that white supremacy has no place in this city. If you truly believe that, remove the gods from whom white supremacists draw their strength, and take the statues down today.”

  The group set a deadline: April 4, 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a fitting deadline. Half a century after King’s death in Memphis, the city remained the fourth most segregated in the US, underperforming in education and income equality—in other words, Memphis still grappled with the issues that prompted the 1968 sanitation workers strike and Dr. King’s visit. And it still had a massive bronze statue honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  While Mayor Strickland supported the issue and had voted for their removal as a city councilman in 2015, he remained committed to following the established procedure and seemed to chafe at the pressure from TakeEmDown, dismissing the group as Facebook warriors.

  Squabbling with potential allies, threats at home, murder in Charlottesville—Sawyer’s long summer had become increasingly bleak. I pointed out to Sawyer that recent story of Confederate statues in Memphis is, in a way, a story of foiled attempts to remove them. When she first set the goal to remove the statues, did it really feel achievable?

  “It wasn’t that it necessarily felt achievable,” she answered. Rather, it felt necessary. Forrest had, in Sawyer’s eyes, bedeviled the city for too long, was the symbol of everything she was fighting against every day. “Achievable” wasn’t the point. The statues simply had to come down. “I felt like if I were mayor, I would just take them down.” But the last two mayors had supported the issue and the city council and the county commission unanimously got behind it, too. Yet still the statues stayed. And it wasn’t simply due to the obstinance of the Historical Commission. This battle long predated the commission. To understand what Sawyer was up against, to understand the staying power of city’s Confederate statues, it’s necessary to go back to the two burials of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  Nineteen

  The Dead Bury Their Dead

  Technically speaking, it’s now a peninsula, but it still keeps the old name: President’s Island. When the Mississippi River surrounded all eight thousand acres of land just south of downtown Memphis, it was the largest island on the great river’s run, but in the late 1940s, the city dammed a section of the river between the island and the city, tethering it to the shore. So, President’s Island: no longer an island, now an industrial park and port. On one of my first reporting trips to the city, I took the causeway out from South Memphis to have a look around. Two main roads, Harbor and Channel Avenues, ran me up and down the developed part of the island, past all the factories: asphalt and petroleum, solvents and steel, the mammoth GlaxoSmithKline facility and the Cargill plant’s huddled silos. All this industry faces the channel, where the port is. But it’s only a narrow strip carved out of the woods and floodplains that make up the rest of the island—reminders of the island’s agricultural past.

  When the Civil War ended, in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau opened a camp here on the island, running a saw mill and providing refuge to 1500 formerly enslaved men and women. But after Reconstruction, the island, like so much of the South, reverted to its prewar state. In 1875, the city of Memphis leased one hundred of its jailed inmates, the majority African American, to work on a new convict-labor farm on the island. The rate: ten cents per day per inmate; the lessee: Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery for all except convicts, an allowance that became the loophole by which the country maintained what writer Douglas A. Blackmon termed “slavery by another name.” Freedmen and women might be arrested on vagrancy charges—for being without work or a home, or for no reason at all—then leased out to farms to labor for the city, the state, or commercial interests like Forrest’s. The labor shortages of a post-Emancipation south were addressed by essentially criminalizing Blackness. Forrest, once a major force in the second middle passage of slavery, became an early adopter of its next phase, too.

  His farm on President’s Island would be the last of Forrest’s string of postwar business ventures. His “Negro Mart” collapsed, the men and women once held inside now emancipated; his plantations lay fallow, lost to interest owed that had accrued during the war; his two railroad ventures went belly up. So Forrest and his wife, Mary Ann, moved to President’s Island, living in a cabin salvaged from their plantation. The inmates lived in a divided brick house adjacent to the Forrests. They worked from can’t see to can’t see, planting cotton, corn, millet, potatoes. Conditions were miserable and the fields malarial, as the Mississippi flowed over the island like green water on a ship’s bow. Things got so bad that the county grand jury actually opened an investigation into the working conditions on the farm. When investigators visited, a reporter for the Memphis Daily Appeal tagged along and could not resist a little fawning over Forrest: “There is a magnetism in his superb presence, even in his shirt sleeves and slouch hat.” But Forrest was not spared the misery of the farm. He likely caught dysentery from the river water and was soon reduced to one hundred pounds, nearly half his war weight.

  Prolonged visits to therapeutic springs proved futile. Forrest told a friend around this time, “I am broke in for
tune, broke in health, broke in spirit.” Sensing the end, he had recently given in to his wife’s pleas to attend a church service with her. The homily that Sunday came from the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders, and afterward, Forrest approached the pastor, the Reverend George T. Stainback, to repent, confessing that he was that man—he had built his house on sand. Before Forrest left President’s Island, Rev. Stainback came to him, wanting to deliver last rites and see to his soul. But, as Stainback wrote in a Memphis newspaper after Forrest’s death, when he sat by Forrest’s sick bed, Forrest told him, “I want you to understand now that I feel that God has forgiven me for all.” He’d found peace, he said, and wanted the Reverend to know that “Between me and . . . the face of my heavenly father, not a cloud intervenes.”

  As you might imagine, Forrest’s late-in-life salvation is often asked to hold much water in his defense. It has always struck me as odd, though. What peace had he found? For what had he sought forgiveness? Was it really a mea culpa? Whatever he confessed or denounced, he didn’t say. Whatever clouds had descended upon him in that last year on President’s Island, he had managed to roll away without the services of the Reverend. Soon after the war, Jack Hurst writes in his biography of Forrest, a former officer had reminded the general that he’d promised to become a Christian once the fighting stopped. Forrest apparently looked around at the Federal troops occupying the city of Memphis and responded that there was still so much un-Christian work to be done. The evangelical’s emphasis on conversion allows for the sudden and assured salvation—one can be “born again” at a moment’s notice by confessing to be a sinner and pledging to seek redemption in the light of His love. Clean slate. Ask and ye shall receive. So what, then, is he actually confessing? And why did he wait for the bitter end to confess it? God only knows.

  But let’s, for a moment, accept the storybook version of events, the one handed down over generations as Forrest’s myth grew, and say he did come to see his actions—the slave-trading, the convict leasing, the Klan promoting—as reprehensible, and renounced them before God. If all that’s forgiven, then why the present-day contorting about the violence of the early Klan? Why the squinting into the sun about the legality of the slave trade? Why defend him in all these things if he himself no longer would? But, again, ideology will assemble the convenient facts and blot out the rest. If you want to love Forrest, you’ll find a way to love Forrest. And look: If he got right with God, far be it from me to knock it. But back here in the material world, we can still hold him accountable for his actions, right? The American carceral system—which has under its control more Black men than were enslaved in 1850—carries on the project of convict leasing and remains shadowed by clouds that Forrest helped form, even as he claimed not to see them.

  Stewing on this, I pulled my car into an empty gravel lot and trudged through some tall grass to look out at the river. It was October. Unseasonably cold. Siberian, even. Okay, not really—the temperature hovered somewhere just below 50 degrees, but I’d lost all tolerance for the cold since moving to the South. Cold enough, anyway, to call to mind a scene from Andrew Lytle’s biography of Forrest, the day he left the island, that “Cold winter’s day he was brought to town by raft.” Bed and beef tea were the doctor’s orders, and conditions out here on the island were unbefitting the deathbed scene of a revered general. So he headed for his brother’s house in town and for the unclouded face of his maker. He sat in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, heated bricks at his feet, as he floated back to the banks of the city. Penetrating wind flapped the robes and blankets of the fifty-five-year-old. The raft poled slowly toward the bluffs, a shiver of brick and blanket on the ice-fragged water. He would not survive the year.

  A stream of visitors came to pay their respects to Forrest back in Memphis. Minor Meriwether, the close friend who claimed to be Forrest’s Grand Scribe in the Klan, brought his son to see Forrest in those last days. Meriwether’s summation of the visit proved prescient. As they descended the steps of the house on Union Avenue, Meriwether looked to his young child and said, “The man you just saw dying will never die.”

  Meriwether wasn’t wrong, symbolically speaking, though Forrest did shake off the mortal coil on October 29, 1877. His first burial took place two days later—Halloween. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, served as a pallbearer; the funeral procession stretched for nearly two miles. The mourners paid their respects in First Presbyterian then gathered graveside at Elmwood Cemetery, per his last living will and testament. And that’s where he’d stay. For twenty-seven years, at least, until the city required his services again.

  Twenty

  The Dead Bury Their Dead Again

  In the year after Forrest’s death, there came a massive outbreak of yellow fever in Memphis. Nearly half the city fled in panic, some taking refuge on President’s Island. Of the twenty thousand who stayed, seventeen thousand contracted the disease, and some five thousand of these died. And the epidemic wasn’t limited to the city—it spread throughout the Delta to places like Holly Springs, Mississippi, where it claimed the lives of Lizzie and James Wells, leaving their oldest child, Ida, to raise her younger siblings. So Wells dropped out of Rust College, became a certified teacher, and took the family to live with an aunt in Memphis. The course of life in the city in which they arrived had been radically changed by the outbreak. Into the void came many rural Blacks and whites from the Delta, and Irish and German immigrants in from the coastal ports. With them came both a plantation ideology and also people like Wells, who were prepared to challenge it.

  Wells found work as a teacher but before long began publishing articles and essays as well. In 1884, after refusing to give up her seat on a Charleston-bound train, she was dragged from the car by three white men. She wrote about the experience for The Living Way, a Memphis-based weekly paper. Her article about the incident brought her attention and a platform for which to continue writing; the lawsuit she filed brought a Tennessee Supreme Court case. She soon left teaching to work for the Memphis Free Speech, serving as a reporter, editor, and co-owner, covering issues of racial justice.

  Her rise as a journalist mirrored the rise of the Black middle class in Memphis. The hub of Black life in the city was on Beale Street—the churches, the barbers, the newspapers, the music—but other neighborhoods thrived, too. Black-owned businesses flourished in a suburb of Memphis known as the Curve, where Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells’, ran the People’s Grocery store. The Curve had rapidly expanded and integrated in the years after the war, and with the rise in population came Black businesses like Moss’s to serve it. But this growth threatened the profits of the established white economy—folks like William Barrett, who once enjoyed a monopoly on the Curve’s grocery business. But it was more than the bottom line that Moss’s enterprise threatened. Free Black business people threatened and enraged a sense of power clung to by postwar white civilians. Stake your identity on the lie of racial superiority, I suppose, and you are bound to feel under constant threat.

  When a fight over a game of marbles broke out between a white boy and a Black boy on the porch of the People’s Grocery in early 1892, Barrett used the ensuing scuffle as a pretense to press charges against Moss. The white police force was happy to oblige. The next day, the county sheriff led a raid on the grocery. More fighting ensued, this time between armed adults, and a sheriff’s deputy caught a bullet in the side. In response, the sheriff arrested Moss and two of his employees, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell. They spent less than twelve hours in custody (and none before a judge) before a group of hooded men entered the jail, removed their hoods, and marched the three men to a waiting train car. Out beyond the city limits, a crowd waited, including white journalists informed ahead of time of what was to come. The mob lined the three men up by the train tracks and killed them with a volley of bullets. Moss’s last words were reportedly, “Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here.”

  Wells’s response to the murders picked
up on Moss’s words. Memphis was “a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts,” she wrote, “but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” The murders, Wells writes in her autobiography, “opened my eyes to what lynching really was: an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the n----- down.’” She began to investigate the nature of lynching across the South—its victims, its executioners, its provocations. In May she published another editorial, this one a survey of eight recent lynchings across the region. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote after recounting the fates of the eight cases, calling it “that same old programme.” A program to “excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country,” with the South “shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women.”

  Wells’s provocations were calculated. Too much was at stake—businesses, bodies, their future prosperity, or even just survival in the city—to remain silent. In speaking out, she became one of the country’s first investigative reporters, developing the methods of the field in her exposé of white supremacy. The response from white Memphis was as vitriolic as her editorial was provocative. The Memphis Evening Scimitar, believing the author male, responded with a threat that seemed to bear out Wells’s point: “If the negroes do not apply the remedy without delay, it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to the stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”