Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  Crutchfield told me about how stressful it was to be a student of color at MTSU, Forrest protests aside. He talked about having been the only Black student in his masters’ cohort, about the condescending feedback he would get on his work; about how other students, in subsequent cohorts, would talk about the same stressors. Still, he acknowledged how much the school has contributed to his growth, how influential some of the professors have been on his thinking. “It’s kind of like living in America,” he explains. “You care for it, but how much energy do I put toward making a place change that historically hasn’t cared for me?”

  Maybe the fatigue Crutchfield was feeling was intergenerational. “For as long as Black students have been on campus,” Crutchfield lamented, “they have been protesting this.”

  Eight

  The Marshmallow Wonderland of the Past

  Nearly fifty years before Crutchfield marched on Forrest Hall, Sylvester Brooks went to the only Middle Tennessee State football game he’d attend, as a student there in the late sixties. Brooks, a tall seventeen-year-old with short-cropped hair and sideburns, arrived on campus in the fall of 1967 in one of the earliest integrated MTSU classes. A few months into his time at MTSU, the university raised an eight-foot, six-hundred-pound bronze medallion of Forrest on the front of the student center. Brooks’s first dorm room was a repurposed storage closet, windowless and cramped. It took his roommate’s sustained complaints to get them reassigned to a proper room. Between classes, white students would come up to him and ask to touch his hair and skin; others, who had grown up in the hills of east Tennessee, were seeing a Black person for the first time when they walked past him on the quad.

  “It did make you feel like you were in The Twilight Zone, that there were people walking around on this earth that were at that level,” Brooks said in an oral history conducted by MTSU in 2000. “How can we talk about the issues that I want to talk about when people are wondering how my hair feels?”

  Brooks had a sense of the racial tension he would encounter at MTSU. A politically active teenager who attended a segregated high school in Memphis, he actively sought to confront (and, he hoped, begin to ameliorate) white people’s pathologies about race in an integrated space. And, since it was up to him to create that integrated space, he enrolled at MTSU—an integrated school with a good prelaw program.

  So Brooks headed out to Floyd Stadium one Saturday in 1968 with trepidation. As an incoming student, he’d been given a campus tour by a Black upperclassman, who, Brooks remembered, told him that going to a game would be a “unique experience.” Still, he wanted to see it for himself. As he looked up into the bleachers that day, here’s what he saw: the student section, white faces all, flapping Confederate flags in the autumn breeze. The flag had been a mainstay at MTSU games for years. The previous spring’s yearbook included a photo of white students holding the stars and bars, captioned with this: “happiness is having your own Confederate flag to wave at the pep rally.” One group of frat brothers would send pledges to games wearing vests of patched-together Confederate flags. Between snaps, the band played “Dixie”—the 1850s minstrel song claimed as the Confederate anthem. Their mascot? A student dressed up as Forrest in a gray wool duster, patrolling the sidelines on horseback.

  He wasn’t surprised at what he found—he’d been warned, after all—but still, he explained to me, he was shocked. “They had no love for me,” he said. Having marched in Memphis and Mississippi as a high school student, Brooks had seen plenty of Confederate flags waved in his direction and harbored no illusions about what those had meant. “They weren’t carrying it as we went by talking about their heritage. They were making a point to me about what they thought I was.” Back in Memphis, Brooks had even received a menacing letter from someone claiming to be in the Klan. His mother had kept a scrapbook of clippings from Brooks’s activism and he texted me a photo of the letter, which warns: “We know how to handle people like you and your kind of filth.” But something about the atmosphere in the stands, the glee that so many of his classmates took in this Old South nostalgia, irked him in a different way. “It was more ‘in your face,’” Brooks told me. And so, he resolved to challenge it.

  The university’s sports teams, in its early years, had no official nickname but were known colloquially (and not altogether reverently) as the Teachers or the Pedagogues. And they performed as one might expect a team so named to perform, so in 1934, the local Daily News Journal sponsored a contest to renickname the school. A football player, taking inspiration from the Colgate University Red Raiders, suggested the Blue Raiders. For his trouble, the paper gave him $5, and the college took the Blue Raiders for a name. In 1938, when Q. M. Smith became school president, he sought to put a finer point on the name. Which Raider, exactly, was the school embodying? Why, Forrest, of course, the school’s logo and stationery soon announced.

  After the Second World War, the university experienced a massive increase in the number of veterans attending under the G.I. Bill, and along with them a crop of fresh-faced boys to be trained to fight the proxy battles of the nascent Cold War. A ROTC program was duly established in 1950. Budding soldiers trained on campus to counter Soviet guerilla tactics, with a few maneuvers inspired by Forrest. But the ROTC program needed a home, so they brick-and-mortared Forrest onto the campus. At the christening in 1958, Dean of Students Belt Keathley explained that, “There was no search for a name for the ROTC building. The name was simply present at hand. The spirit of the man for whom the building is named resides on our campus.”

  Dr. Frisby, the chair of the Forrest Hall task force, touched on the post-war connection between Forrest and the new ROTC program in an essay he wrote, one intended to ground the current Forrest debate in the history of the school’s affiliation. “With the campus and community public memory tied inexorably with their martial heritage,” Frisby writes, “Forrest rode boldly into Murfreesboro again.”

  In the broader context of the political moment, however, it’s hard to see such Confederate symbolism only in terms of martial heritage. In the years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, the Confederate flag was rarely publicly displayed. It only came back into wider circulation with Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat rebellion in 1948—a splinter group of Southern Democrats who opposed the modest civil rights concessions made by President Harry Truman. Then suddenly the flags were everywhere. John Rankin, a congressman from Mississippi, admitted in 1951 that he had “never seen as many Confederate flags in all my life as I have observed floating here in Washington during the last few months.” In 1956, Georgia state representative Denmark Groover put a finer point on its reemergence when he claimed that the state’s newly approved flag included Confederate symbolism “mostly out of defiance to federal integration orders.” The flags that Sylvester Brooks saw at the football game at Floyd stadium were not there by accident. They were there because he was there.

  And with the flags came Confederate monuments. The first wave of monument building came around the turn of the century, the symbolic equivalent of the Jim Crow laws then being enacted. Then, in the years between the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, there came another wave, this time with an increased emphasis on school names. Public celebrations of Forrest followed this same trajectory. Once a point of civic pride in Memphis, turnout out for Forrest’s birthday dwindled in the forties and early fifties. In 1958, however (the same year MTSU dedicated Forrest Hall), hundreds again filled Forrest Park, a crowd that Nathan’s great-granddaughter Mary Forrest Bradley attributed to the “desegregation crisis.” Given this wider context, and given the fact that in 1958 MTSU had yet to integrate after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision, you have to squint awfully hard to see only the town’s martial heritage in that building’s name.

  The school did desegregate in 1962. That same year, a premed student from Connecticut named Dick Schooman became the first to portray Forrest as the s
chool’s mascot. I found a photo of Schooman in an old MTSU yearbook. He’s goateed and uniformed, his jaw clenched and jutted as he leads a horse by the reins in a homecoming procession. The resemblance was uncanny, as if someone had enhanced and retouched one of the old photos of Forrest I’ve given over so much time to scrutinizing, then slipped the image into an old yearbook. In fact, when I saw that photograph, I gasped, so loudly that if anyone in the school’s archives had heard it, they would have thought it contrived or exaggerated. But it wasn’t Forrest. Sitting there in 2016, I stared into a space-time rift, looking at an image of a 1962 impersonation of the general in 1862.

  From the perspective of his admirers, it’s only natural that Forrest would prowl the sidelines of a football game. Historian Court Carney sees a cult of masculinity surrounding Forrest. In his essay “Most Man in the World,” Carney traces this manly reverence for the general from the UDC, who thought of him as a “manly man, fearless and true,” to author Shelby Foote, whose admiration of Forrest gives the essay its title and whose depiction of Forrest in his novel Shiloh is one of the warrior phallus incarnate: “ . . . [H]acking and slashing, riding them down. His saber looked ten feet long; it flashed and glinted.” In Carney’s view, Robert E. Lee was emasculated by the surrender at Appomattox and so could not bear all the symbolic weight the defeated but unvanquished white South had to heap upon its generals. Lee’s gallant respectability, his aristocratic poise, kept him in the collective memory (and in many a courthouse square), but it only got him so far. Whereas Forrest, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, came to represent an increasingly violent masculinity in which “bloodlust replaced chivalry, malicious violence eclipsed moral courage.” If football is a way to channel military impulses, then it was only a matter of time before imitation Forrests started popping up on the sidelines in Middle Tennessee.

  But with integration came challenges to the school’s Confederate costume play. The winter before Sylvester Brooks’s lone visit to Floyd Stadium, Brooks remembered that a fight broke out at an MTSU basketball game when the Forrest mascot patted a Black player on the back. The player took exception to this imitation Forrest laying a hand on him and retaliated with his fist. It’s a sort of Fort Sumter of MTSU’s symbolic civil war—the first shot across the bow in a campaign that has now stretched out for half a century. Previously, the college could claim to see Forrest’s hand only as heroic and admirable, holding the reins of the good old days. By the late sixties, they could no longer do so unchecked. Students of color now insisted their white classmates see that hand as one that held the shackles, the saber, the torch.

  That fall, a few weeks after Brooks attended that MTSU football game, he published a letter in the school paper. Titled “What Dixie Means,” Brooks wrote: “As long as these remnants of slavery and Black inferiority are allowed to persist on this campus, I will never choose to be a full part of this school.” He asked his fellow white students if they’d ever thought about what “Dixie” means to a Black student, if they’d ever cared enough to even try to consider it. He called on the school to understand the full context of their symbols and traditions. Desegregation meant the end of a tradition, he wrote, an immoral tradition. “Other traditions are equally wrong and equally outdated. It is time we, as citizens and students, started living in the concrete reality of the present, instead of the marshmellow [sic] wonderland of the past.”

  Reactions to Brooks’s piece were forceful—negative and positive alike. Many white students were defensive, claiming that their pining for the Old South was only about celebrating heritage. One letter-writer advised the editors that if they were struggling to fill column space, they were better off leaving their pages blank. Classmates pinned nasty notes to his dorm-room door and vandalized his room, but Brooks told me he was unbothered. Partly, that was because he knew he had reached other people. Students had also written to the school paper to thank him. One woman wrote that the campus should have the good sense to move away from Confederate symbolism and let Forrest’s mistakes “stay buried along with his bones.” And the letter got results. Brooks made his case to the student government, who then voted to remove “Dixie” from the bandstand and Forrest from the sidelines, if not the student center or the ROTC hall. But Forrest got a hero’s farewell. The caption accompanying a photograph of one of the mascot’s last appearances stated that Forrest “has mounted and ridden into the sunset.”

  Nine

  Palliatives

  Even after all these years, Brooks’s letter still retains its rhetorical force, its moral clarity. Partly that’s because the questions he raised are ones Americans are still asking and struggling to answer today. “Why is it you wave your Confederate flags? Why is it you sing your song, ‘Dixie’? Why do you pay homage to General Nathan Bedford Forrest?” he asked. “All these things are remnants of a very old South, and have no meaningful place in the new South that so many people are working so hard for. You cannot seek a newer world while clinging so passionately to the relics of days long given to the past. One cannot move forward if his mind constantly moves backward.”

  Yet here we are, fifty years later. Why haven’t we been able to move forward? Searching for answers to Brooks’s questions, I paid a visit to Sarah Calise, an archivist at MTSU’s Albert Gore Research Center. The Gore Center is on the bottom floor of Todd Hall, the university’s art building. Calise was at her desk here when the first march on Forrest Hall passed by her window in the summer of 2015. She dropped everything, grabbed her camera, and joined the crowd—part documentarian, part participant in the latest battle over Forrest. Since then, Calise has been assembling a digital archive of the Forrest Hall protests. Together, we reconnoitered in the stacks of the university’s archive and talked about her work.

  When Calise started documenting protests against Forrest on campus, she, too, was asking herself questions similar to those posed by Brooks. So she tried to trace the problem back to its root. When did the school start to use symbols of Forrest and, more important, why? She pulled selections of what she’d found in that hunt through the past. There were photo albums full of fraternity boys dressed up as Confederate soldiers—one from a toga-Confederate crossover party. A yearbook from the 1950s she’d pulled includes a cartoon Confederate soldier who had somehow become unstuck in time to roam the campus and to guide the reader through the book. Imagine the Microsoft paperclip animation, but with kepi and hardtack. It’s high-concept, low-production-value Confederate kitsch (a standout in that crowded subgenre). In the margin of the student organization page, the Confederate soldier, grinning ear to ear, takes from his haversack a Klan hood, as if to say: Here’s our organization.

  Then Calise handed me a copy of an even older yearbook, this one from 1930. A series of paintings intersperse the volume, illustrating a day in the life of a rural Tennessean: daybreak with mule and plow, an afternoon harvesting hay, a Klan lynching that evening, and dancing by the river at night. Their order restored and spirits buoyed, they can finally admit that “the sun shines as brightly and the moon as softly as it did before the war.”

  It is a galling and revealing glimpse of the school’s collective frame of mind. The school “clung tenaciously to the Lost Cause identity prominent in the period,” Derek Frisby, the chair of the task force, wrote in his essay on the school’s history with Forrest, arguing that the “connection between the traditions of the Old South and the school may have served as a palliative for a campus suffering under severe economic distress.” But given the nature of the imagery, this palliative was clearly prescribed for racial anxieties as much as, if not more than, economic ones.

  In his assessment, Frisby echoes Andrew Lytle’s appraisal of Nathan Bedford Forrest in his 1931 biography, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company, in which he deemed Forrest the “spiritual comforter” of the South. The biography champions Forrest as a shining exponent of everything admirable about the yeoman South. Lytle was born in Murfreesboro into a prominent middle Tennessee
family and was a descendant of Captain William Lytle, the revolutionary commander who named the town. Considered a lion of Southern letters, Andrew Lytle was part of the Southern Renaissance and the editor of The Sewanee Review in the 1960s. When Lytle died in 1995, an obituary in the Review stated that, with his death, “the Confederacy at last came to its end.” If only. He’s best known, though, as one of the “Agrarians” who contributed an essay to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a collection that put forward a vision for and defense of Jeffersonian ideals rooted in the rural, the agricultural, and as the title suggests, the Old South ethos. The collection was published in 1930, the same year as the yearbook open in front of me. Industrialism had come late to the South, but when it did, the Agrarians—this collection of poets and writers and historians based at nearby Vanderbilt University—felt they’d reached the Rubicon. “Commerce cannot be assimilated to the life-pattern of the community,” these twelve Southerners wrote in the cosigned introduction. Although the primary tension, in their view, was agrarian versus industrial, there were racial overtones as well. The utopia they meant to define and defend, like that dream of the South from whence they came, conceived of a paradise only for white people. As Paul V. Murphy writes in his study of the Agrarians, The Rebuke of History, “At the heart of Agrarianism was the question of not only where do I stand, but also, who belongs?”