Confederate Memorials as Instruments of Racial Terror
JULY 24, 2015
By BRENT STAPLES
... Most were erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Southern states were eagerly dismantling the rights and liberties that African-Americans had enjoyed just after the Civil War, during Reconstruction. These states unleashed a racialized reign of terror and shored up white supremacy by rewriting their Constitutions to disqualify African-Americans from full citizenship.
As nonpersons in the eyes of the state, black people had no standing to challenge the rush of Civil War nostalgia that led the South to stock its parks and public squares with symbols that celebrated the Confederate cause of slavery and instilled racial fear. Only in recent decades have black elected officials and some whites started to push back against the Confederate narrative of Southern civic life ...
... those honoring the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest deserve the backlash they have generated. Forrest presided over the 1864 massacre of Union soldiers, many of them black, at Fort Pillow in Tennessee. He was also a prominent slave trader and served as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ...
Two years ago, the Memphis City Council expunged Confederate names from three parks, one of them named in honor of Forrest. The Council argued that the names were inappropriate for a majority-black city and inconsistent with the cosmopolitan image that Memphis wished to cultivate. The Ku Klux Klan marched in protest ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/confederate-memorials-as-instruments-of-racial-terror.html?_r=0
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