Undeterred, Wells published Southern Horrors two months later. The pamphlet presented a unified-field theory of postwar racial violence: Black success in business threatened white power, consensual interracial sex threatened white masculinity. “The whole matter is explained by the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race. This is crystallized in the oft-repeated slogan: ‘This is a white man’s country and a white man must rule.’” Frederick Douglass praised the book in a letter to Wells, writing:
If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
Over the course of the 1890s, while Wells published work that, in Douglass’s estimation, should raise a scream of shame to heaven, a group of white men in Memphis raised money to build a monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest. By the turn of the century they’d raised enough to commission the acclaimed sculptor Charles Niehaus. In 1901, Niehaus, whose studio was in Paris, came to Memphis to pore over pictures and paintings of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The monument committee managed to dig up records from Forrest’s tailor and could thus produce proportions of an accuracy far beyond anything photographs could provide. Niehaus wanted the statue facing south to better catch the light in the park, which took some persuading, as it ran counter to the idea that these statues should face north—Never Retreat. Niehaus also posited that a life-size statue would appear skewed from atop a pedestal and suggested the statue be one and a half times life-size, thus more imposing and proportional when seen from below. He offered to make the alteration at his own expense. Niehaus spent three years on the design, nine months on the casting.
This statue—grand, precise, larger-than-life as it was—this statue alone would not suffice. No, they had to raise the dead, too. And so, on a November day in 1904, employees at the Hoist and Bros. hoofed it out to Elmwood Cemetery, “amid flowers wilted by the early wintry blasts,” as the Commercial Appeal described, to dig up the general and his wife. The author of the article is careful to note how the undertakers averted their eyes from the caskets when they exhumed the bodies, as “no one wished to be sacrilegious nor to destroy their conception by a glimpse at the realistic work of time and the forces of nature and decay.” The gravediggers then loaded the bodies in their wagon and clopped over to the newly christened Forrest Park, where they lowered the bodies into the base of the soon-to-be-erected monument. A small crowd looked on, including Nathan and Mary Ann’s son, William, and a few schoolchildren who, the article notes, “gaped in curiosity at the informal ceremony of placing the bodies under the sod.”
When spring came, they unveiled the statue. “The air was soft and throaty and Southern,” the paper reported of that May afternoon in 1905, and out from the roadsters that cluttered the perimeter streets of the park and out from the streetcars, recently installed and more recently segregated, thirty thousand people poured in to catch a first glimpse of the new statue. The crowd in the park was so dense that one journalist speculated it would take a police escort to elbow one’s way to the statue. Veterans of the Confederate States Army trooped up Second Avenue, doubled back and countermarched in a Confederate crosshatch. Around two thirty that afternoon, Kathleen Bradley, Forrest’s eight-year-old great granddaughter, climbed the terrace and yanked at the corner of the flag to reveal the bronze below. “In bronze in the fairest of Memphis parks, with head bared and intrepid eyes directed to the land he loved so well,” the Appeal wrote of the statue, “Gen. Forrest commands today as he did in the days of struggle and strife. . . . He sits the more supreme in the saddle to exercise an unconscious influence among the people who so honored him yesterday.”
The Civil War had, by the time of the unveiling, been over for forty years, Forrest dead for twenty-seven, but still his influence was required. Memphis lawyer and Forrest monument booster S. T. Carnes tried to reckon that interval. “The present presses hard upon the past,” he said. Remembering Forrest’s “daring achievements” was bittersweet, because the past had been shattered to pieces, by “new men and new ideas and new interests . . . The shadows darken about the survivors of Forrest.”
Senator Thomas Battle Turley then announced that “the principles of the cause for which Forrest fought are not dead, and they will live as long as there is a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood on the face of the earth.” Still less subtle, a comic in The News-Scimitar depicted the statue with a group of Klansmen riding behind, captioned: “Forrest again wears the shroud.” The ceremony’s most hyperbolic moment, though, came courtesy of John Allen Wyeth, known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy, who proclaimed Forrest the “American Mars.” But, as the ceremony made clear, Forrest was the God of War for a different battle now, a battle against new men and new ideas and new interests, one that had more to do with Ida B. Wells than it did with Ulysses S. Grant.
Twenty-One
The Mountaintop
On a February night in 1968, an ambulance carried Echol Cole and Robert Walker through pouring rain and past Forrest Park to John Gaston Hospital, just around the corner. Cole and Walker, two Memphis sanitation workers, had been near the end of a long shift, their clothes soiled from garbage and drenched from rain. That day, there had been a sudden, heavy downpour—a “gully washer,” as they say in Memphis. Four men worked a route, but only two fit in the cab, so Cole and Walker hunched on the back. When the truck hit a pothole, a stray shovel tripped a faulty circuit, triggering the compactor and crushing the two men. Their deaths prompted city sanitation workers to unionize. “We wanted to keep our jobs but we wanted some dignity, some decency out of it,” Taylor Rogers, a sanitation worker who took part in the strike, explained in a 1988 interview. They worked long hours for little pay and no hope of advancing in a segregated system that kept 80 percent of the Black labor force in unskilled jobs. But Mayor Henry Loeb—a newly elected, old-school segregationist—refused to acknowledge, let alone negotiate with, the union. So on February 12, 1,300 sanitation workers marched to City Hall. “We decided that if you keep your back bent somebody can ride it,” Rogers said, “But if you stand up they have to get off your back.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis two months later, on March 28, to lend support to the sanitation workers’ strike. He was then in the midst of marshaling his Poor People’s Campaign, a crusade for economic justice across racial lines that would march a mule train from Marks, Mississippi, to Washington D.C. “It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote,” King said in a speech early in 1968. “But now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” Rev. James Lawson, an old friend of King’s then helping to lead the sanitation workers strike in Memphis, told King he’d be hard-pressed to find a “more potent juncture of poverty and race” than the Memphis strike.
That year, Time magazine referred to the city as “a decaying Mississippi River town,” but it was also known as the Plantation City. For the first half of the twentieth century, Memphis politics was a machine assembled, owned, and operated by E. H. Crump. He served as mayor from 1908 to 1916 and afterward pulled the levers from beyond the reach of the voting public. Crump named Klan leader Cliff Davis chief of police, then to a thirteen-term congressional seat. The police “functioned like Klansmen in blue uniforms,” as author Michael K. Honey writes in his book on the sanitation strike, Going Down Jericho Road. Likewise, Crump and Loeb were against organized labor: “n----- unionism,” Crump called it. But the city still drew Black people looking to escape the violence and even more drastic poverty found in the rural parts of the region. The so-called “Delta flow” kept the vibrancy of Beale Street, its music, its industry, its opportunity, shinin
g with sufficient wattage. And yet, in 1953, the median income of Black families was $1,348, compared to $3,085 for whites. Black sanitation workers made $1.04 an hour—a forty-hour week’s pay that totaled less than the welfare minimum. Thus, their strike was taking on a power system that, for the entire century since the Civil War, had systematically exploited Black laborers.
King first delivered a speech at the Mason Temple to a crowd packed up to, and perching on, the rafters, then led a march down Beale Street. But the march turned violent. Younger activists in Memphis, who did not subscribe to the Kingian tactics of nonviolence, began throwing bricks through storefront windows. In response, police gassed, clubbed, and arrested marchers, three hundred in all. One police officer cornered an unarmed sixteen-year-old in a stairwell and killed him with a shotgun at close range. It was the first time an SCLC march had turned violent of its own doing.
Though the Poor People’s Campaign was sputtering and sorely needed King’s shoulder at its wheel, he felt he had to redeem the strike as well as the reputation of his movement. So a week later, he returned to Memphis. In a speech that came to be known as the “Mountaintop Speech,” King remembered aloud how he’d been a sneeze away from death when he was stabbed in 1958 and recounted all the questions he’d heard since arriving in Memphis, people asking if he worried what “some of our sick white brothers” might do to him. No matter. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said. “I’ve seen the promised land.” He ended by reciting the Battle Hymn of the Republic, that old war’s battle cry.
The next evening, James Earl Ray, one of those “sick white brothers,” in his room at a boarding house across from the Lorraine Motel, tucked his Remington rifle under his shirt and headed for the shared second-floor bathroom. Across the street, Dr. King leaned over the balcony of the motel to request a song at that night’s meeting. Then Ray unlatched the window, looked down the scope, and pulled the trigger. Just two months after Echol Cole and Robert Walker were killed, Dr. King was also pronounced dead in the John Gaston hospital, half a block from where the bronze Forrest stood.
Twenty-Two
A Preponderance of Goodwill
For over a century now, the Forrest statue has been a towering bronze magnetic needle on the city’s compass of race and memory. Decisions about who is remembered, who matters, what Memphis should stand for, and, literally, who should stand for the city, are often measured against the statue. So many Lost Causers, civil rights activists, recalcitrant historians, and politicians of every stripe have spun into its orbit. In the years after King’s death, the debate over Forrest’s statue grew more heated, the critiques and defenses more pointed. In the eighties, the statue was spray painted with the letters KKK, and when the city used a sandblaster to remove the graffiti, they took the statue’s verdigris with it. The acclaimed novelist and historian Shelby Foote, long besotted with Forrest, who he called “one of the most attractive men to ever walk through the pages of history,” was hopping mad, complaining that his revered general now looked like a Hershey Bar. In 2013, when the city voted to rename Forrest Park the more anodyne Health Sciences Park, the Klan marched through town. A few years later, in an effort to hasten the city to remove the statue, a group of activists dug up a few inches of grass from around the statue, prompting one man to drive across the state with a patch of sod from his own yard to replace the divot.
“[Forrest] gives us a language in which we can argue about other things—political power-sharing, affirmative action, civil rights, equal opportunity, a host of issues that haven’t been settled—while speaking about him,” Michael Kelley, a columnist for the Commercial Appeal, noted in 2005, on the centennial anniversary of the statue’s dedication. The conversation might change, but the tensions, and the setting, remained. Nearly every time I’ve visited the statue, there has been a police car parked on the grass, just as each subsequent state-sanctioned killing of Black Americans is likely to bring another round of graffiti or protest to the statue. Same war, same general.
And then, in the fall of 2017, there arose a new battlefield in that old war: Athens, Tennessee. The City of Memphis had successfully argued that because the Historical Commission had not properly adopted the rules of the Heritage Protection Act, their ruling was thus void. The commission granted the city another hearing on the fate of the Forrest statue.
On an overcast October Friday in 2017, the Tennessee Historical Commission came to order on the bottom floor of the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum in Athens, a small town located about 380 miles from Memphis down I-40. On the docket once more was the waiver application to remove the Forrest statue. The meeting coincided with a quilting exhibition, and the commissioners, under drop-ceiling halogens and flanked by star-block and patchwork-patterned quilts, heard nearly two hours of testimony and debate about Forrest.
Tami Sawyer and two friends drove in from Memphis to testify—an early-morning, six-hour trek that, just two months after the violence in Charlottesville, had her nervously checking her rearview mirror. “Knowing that people know what you are going for, we could have been tailed,” she said. “We played music and laughed and joked but it was tense.” As she pulled in, however, she realized the tragedy had already returned as farce. On the sidewalk in front of the museum, H. K. Edgerton, a Black man in the gray of the Confederacy, waved a large Confederate flag at the passing cars.
“We were like: Fuck. Okay. This is what this is going to be,” Sawyer remembers thinking as she arrived and saw Edgerton.
The crowd was standing room only, the chairs arranged in an L-shape around the conference table: a contingent of Confederates to the left; a contingent of Memphis politicians and activists on the right. Testifying to the commission, Mayor Jim Strickland noted: “We must understand and come to terms with why this statue exists in the first place . . . It’s a monument to Jim Crow.” He circulated a comic published when the statue was first dedicated, depicting Forrest in Klan regalia. Then Sawyer addressed the commission: “We demand that immediate action is taken. These statues can no longer stand and represent inaccurate history.” When she called Forrest a rapist and murderer, the crowd to her left hissed. “I felt like I was in Harry Potter,” she told me, referencing the “Parseltongues” who can speak to snakes.
Speaking in defense of the statue, Memphis public school teacher Elizabeth Adams warned that “next they’ll want to remove the crosses from our churches,” while Edgerton referred to Sawyer as “that girl” and told of how benevolent a slave-trader Forrest was. Several men on the left side of the room stood to salute Edgerton when he finished speaking.
Finally, at the request of Keith Norman, a commission representative from west Tennessee, the council voted. “I held out hope that objective minds could see in a city that is 63 percent African American, and the statue erected with a clear intention of intimidating these people and on the eve of the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination in that city,” Rev. Norman told me after the meeting, “that a preponderance of goodwill” among his fellow commissioners would prevail and they would grant a waiver.
The council voted: the statue stayed.
“I approached it with a sense of purity that was a little too naïve,” Norman reflected. Forrest “behaved or associated with things that were atrocious to people of color and we need to recognize that.” Alas, Norman said, “the evidence and hopes and cries of the people fell on deaf ears.”
After the meeting, I walked out with Sawyer, past all the hanging quilts. Sawyer was exhausted by the day’s travel and testimony, frustrated by the ruling, weary of the theatrics—a “shit show,” she called it.
“Stay Black!” she called to Edgerton, who was back to billowing his flag on the side of the road, before she climbed into her car for the return journey to Memphis, where that night she staged a die-in at the entrance to the FedEx Forum before the Grizzlies game.
Twenty-Three
Remember Fort Pillow
A few weeks after the Historical Commission’
s meeting in Athens, I headed back to Memphis. Because the statue had once more been granted reprieve, I decided, on this trip, to visit another star in the constellation of Forrest’s memory—one more distant and diminished, but no less consequential. I headed out to the Austin Peay Highway and drove north until WEVL (that hodgepodge of blues and soul and country that is a lone bright spot of these long drives with a broken CD player) turned to static. Near Henning, I tracked east, back toward the Mississippi River on a county road, under a long stretch of oaks that reached across the road to tunnel me in shade, then past the cannon at the gate of Fort Pillow State Historic Park.
The park sits on a bluff above the Mississippi River’s tightest turn. The fort once stood directly above the water, allowing soldiers to fire on the boats below, but the river, ever-shifting, has now moved two miles west, away from the fort. To get a sense of this slipperiness, call up a composite map of the river over the years—it will look like snakes twisted on a staff down the center of the country. And like the river’s meander, the park sits on a shifting ground of memory, offering no conclusive answer as to how one should remember the battle that took place here in April 1864.
By then three years into the war, Forrest struck camp in northern Mississippi and headed north in need of men and supplies. Twice in the past year alone, Forrest had scoured the area around western Tennessee in search of more recruits and provisions. “There is a Federal force of 500 or 600 at Fort Pillow,” Forrest wrote in a letter, “which I shall attend to in a day or two, as they have horses and supplies which we need.”
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