As noted in the text, Court Carney’s work on the history and historiography of Nathan Bedford Forrest was indispensable. In “The Most Man in the World: Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Cult of Masculinity in the South” and other essays and publications, Carney astutely lays out the complexity of Forrest’s legacy, its contingencies, and its evolution.
The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, edited by James W. Lowen and Edward H. Sebesta, collects primary sources from both the Confederacy and its latter-day acolytes. The speeches, documents, and essays collected there make clear the animating force of the war for the Confederacy: the preservation and expansion of slavery.
The Albert Gore Center and the Middle Tennessee State University Heritage Center provided me with documents on the history of the school, its entanglement with Forrest, and its freighted connection to the surrounding community. The Forrest Hall Protest Collection, in the Digital Collections at Walker Library, MTSU, is a rich resource of information. In particular, “A Confederate on Campus: Nathan Bedford Forrest as MTSU’s Mascot,” by Josh Howard, and the essays of Elizabeth Catte deepened the historical context of the 2015–2016 campaign to change the name of Forrest Hall from students’ points of view. All told, the Gore Center’s collection was a researcher’s dream.
Thanks also to Daily News Journal, whose coverage of the 2015–2016 campaign helped me to keep a finger on the pulse of the Middle Tennessee community.
Part Three
Neil R. McMillen’s The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 set Jack Kershaw’s work in broader context of the “massive resistance” to the legislative gains of the civil rights movement.
For information on more recent resistance to civil rights, I relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center and their blog Hatewatch. Ryan Lenz’s reporting on the League of the South’s evolution proved especially crucial.
Robyn Semien and Zoe Chace’s reporting on the aftermath of the Charlottsville rally for the PRX radio show This American Life oriented me to the machinations of the event’s planners in the lead-up to the rally.
Likewise, online media collective Unicorn Riot’s invaluable work in assembling and publishing documents about the planning of the Unite the Right rally furthered my understanding of the goals of the rally, while their collection of footage from that day allowed me to see the chaos unfold from multiple points of view.
Bradley Dean Griffin’s commentaries on his blog, Occidental Dissent, and his various social media accounts provided useful information about the League of the South’s evolving role in the Confederate monument debate and proved to be as illuminating as it was disturbing. Michael Hill also maintains a prolific online presence that helped me to better understand how he sought to position and recruit for the League of the South.
As Chapter Two makes clear, Elaine Frantz Parsons’ book Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction deeply informed my understanding of the procedures and public posturings of the early Klan.
The anecdote from Chapter Two about the “bottom rail on top” exchange comes from James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era—a terrific single-volume history of the war. The quote from Simon Elder there comes from Volume Seven of the “Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States.” The anecdote about the Birmingham Klan screening Birth of a Nation comes from Gary May’s book The Informant: The FBI, The Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. The reference to the murders during the constitutional conventions comes from Adam Gopnik’s essay in The New Yorker (April 8, 2019) on Reconstruction, “How the South Won the Civil War.” The passage regarding the League of the South’s pressure on Albemarle officials to charge Harris and Long is sourced from Tess Owens’s reporting at Vice News.
Part Four
The archives of the Benjamin L. Hooks Public Library in Memphis were a valuable resource while writing this book. Their clipping files contain a century and a half of newspaper articles about Forrest and his legend. Their digital collection includes the pamphlet published by the Forrest Monument Association titled The Forrest Monument: Its History and Dedication; A Memorial in Art, Oratory and Literature. It is from here that I source the information on the statue’s production process and dedication in Chapter Three. Their microfilm collection includes the Appeal article describing the reinterment of Forrest and his wife, also in that chapter.
I drew on much of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s work, including The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. I relied on Paula Giddins’s Ida: A Sword Among Lions for supplemental biographical information. John Cimprich’s Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory and Andrew Ward’s River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War provided a foundation for understanding the Fort Pillow massacre and its contested place in public memory. Wendi C. Thomas’s MLK50.com project produced insightful, thoughtful coverage of the #TakeEmDown901 campaign and connected it to broader social-justice movements in the city. Likewise, the reporting of the Memphis Commercial Appeal was crucial in following the yearslong, labyrinthine process of removing the statue from Health Sciences Park. (A brief exhortation to the reader, if I may: Subscribe to your local newspaper!) Nate DiMeo’s Memory Palace podcast’s episode on the Forrest statue in Memphis is, in DiMeo’s typical style, informative, lyrical, and gutting. Listening to that episode in the summer of 2015 made me think that my idea about Forrest statues could hold a book.
About the Author
Connor Towne O’Neill’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Vulture, Slate, RBMA, and the Village Voice, and he works as a producer on the NPR podcast White Lies. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he lives in Auburn, Alabama, where he teaches at Auburn University and with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. This is his first book.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2020 by Connor Towne O’Neill. All rights reserved.
“What Kind of Times Are These.” Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
A previous version of “At the Foot of the Ugliest Confederate Memorial” first appeared in New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer in different form.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016840
e-ISBN: 978-1-64375-110-8
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