The next morning, chain-link fencing already surrounded the empty pedestal, but Millar hopped it to pay his respects to his ancestor buried beneath. Soon city police arrived to ask him to leave—he was now trespassing on private property.
Millar seemed confident, though, that the statues would return. On behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Forrest family, he has helped file two separate suits against the city and Greenspace, which he calls a “sham nonprofit”—one in civil court, the other in criminal.
The injunctions haven’t prevented Greenspace from hosting a series of events in the park, events that Van Turner hopes will establish a more inclusive space. Even as Millar and I spoke, a dozen people met in a patch of grass between Union Avenue and the concrete pedestal where we stood, rolled out their yoga mats, and began a series of sun salutations—the first in a new series of lunch-hour classes Turner has organized.
Millar told me that his parents didn’t emphasize their Confederate heritage growing up and told him about his ancestry only when he developed an interest in the Civil War as a teenager. Climbing on the cannons during a class trip to Shiloh laid the bait; studying the war in junior high hooked him. It was only then that his parents told him, oh by the way, you’re descended from John Singleton Mosby, a cavalry leader known as the Gray Ghost, and more distantly, from General Forrest.
When I pointed out the yoga class to Millar, visible just over his shoulder, and described Greenspace’s effort to make the park feel more inclusive, he told me about a conversation he’d once had with a Black woman who didn’t mind the statue. He then suggested that anyone who felt excluded by the statue suffered from a “mental handicap.” Forrest was a Tennessean, he said, a Memphian, and revered by millions. “You should never tear down history. You should always add to it.”
But the monument went up in 1905, I said. Didn’t the statue say as much about the time it went up—the Jim Crow era—as it did the moment it sought to commemorate? But Millar wouldn’t hear it. He insisted that the statue is about the war, plain and simple. The South just didn’t have the money to do it earlier. “It had nothing to do with white supremacy, it had nothing to do with Jim Crow laws, it had nothing to do with racism.” If they were putting it up because of white supremacy, no one would have stopped them from saying so, he insisted.
I tried another tack, this one from the Civil War era: Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said explicitly that slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy and thus the cornerstone of the war.
“Yeah, I feel that opinion is wrong, too. He’s just one man.”
When I asked if he could concede that his opponents had any points to make, he told me that he attributed the disagreement to people being “so severely uneducated” about Forrest. “They say he was a slave owner. Well big deal, so were eleven of the first thirteen presidents.” He was a slave trader, sure, but it was an accepted thing back then.
“Well it wasn’t accepted by everyone, surely,” I said.
“It was tolerated. . . . You can’t blame him for that because he was just in business.” Besides, Millar said, he took good care of his slaves, never selling to anybody he felt was bad.
I grimaced and Millar cut short his next line, telling me to go ahead. I said that I was trying to put myself in the position of being enslaved and thought that there would be no such thing as a good slave owner.
“Well, you can say that today, but of course there were a lot of free Blacks then, too. But slavery was just one of those things,” he said, before embarking on a lengthy explanation about how enslaved people were able to work extra hours, for pay, to make money to buy their freedom. “There were,” as he put it, “avenues out of it.”
And Unite the Right? Where open, avowed white supremacists defended Confederate statues explicitly because they felt they aligned with their beliefs? That march could have been at “a bus stop,” he insisted. “The white supremacists used that issue as an excuse because Black Lives Matter were trying to take down the Robert E. Lee statue.” In his view, it was just something, anything, to rally around.
Feeling like we were coming to the end of our conversation, I ran a theory about ideology by Millar. Was there a sort of “cafeteria Catholicism”—the picking and choosing parts of the faith that align with your worldview and discarding the rest—when it came to Forrest? “I think that happens in any case with any history. You want to remember the stuff that sinks into you and is significant to you.” And for Millar, Forrest meant so many positive things, and yet his critics only wanted to talk about the negatives. So, he said, there will always be supporters who want to say “Yeah but . . .”
I was struck by Millar’s framework—the contrarian impulse in Forrest’s defense, it made sense. Yeah but . . . it was legal. Yeah but . . . he’s only one man. As I walked back across the park at the end of our conversation, I wondered if, for Millar, this was all part of the fun, a kind of historical trolling. He’s our guy, the thinking seems to go. We love him. If you want to hate him, fine, but you can’t make me. And, in fact, the more you hate him, and the more you try to guilt me or shame me into renouncing him, the more joy I’ll take in loving him.
Naturally, Lee Millar and his SCV troop were not the only ones enraged by the city’s removal of the Forrest monument. In retaliation, the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature revoked $250,000 in funding the state had earmarked for the city’s bicentennial celebration slated for 2019.
“We helped that,” said Billy Helton, the thirty-something leader of the Hiwaymen and Confederate 901 (who also goes by “Billy Sessions”). The Hiwaymen are a group of right-wing protesters who formed during the monument protests in New Orleans and who attended the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. “We travel. We stand up for what’s right and what needs to be defended,” he explained. That list includes the Bundys, the Second Amendment, and, more recently, Confederate monuments. History needs to stay, Helton told me, good or bad.
The Unite the Right rally, which Helton attended, “built a fire in us,” he told me. The removal of the Forrest statue only fanned the flame. So, two weeks after the statue came down, Helton, who lives in Scott County, Arkansas, organized a caravan around the city of Memphis, dubbing it Confederate 901.
“We sent a message to the Tennessee legislature that we weren’t going to lay down and let crooked politicians and the left rob us of our history.” Plus, Helton crowed, the police escort for his protest had cost the city over $100,000. The legislature’s subsequent revoking of the quarter-million-dollar budget line only furthered Helton’s sense of the protest’s impact.
The protests seemed to provide a pressure-release valve for Helton. During our conversation, he lamented a sense of loss over the last thirty years, a sense that the federal government had conscripted everyone as “slaves” through overregulation and bureaucracy. “I’m in the poor part of the country,” he told me. “I’m in the mountains of Arkansas. Wages are fucked here. There’re very little jobs in these hole-in-the-wall towns. We chose to be here because we were born and raised here. We know we could go where there’s more opportunity but we don’t. We could leave but we don’t.” Helton feels bound to the place through family, through history. A history he feels is now under threat.
Helton lamented all the deaths of the Civil War. “More men died in that war than with the others put together,” he said. Didn’t that mean something? He felt he could honor the meaning of all that loss by protecting Confederate statues. When I suggested, though, that the statues also represented the enslavement of other people’s families, Helton pushed back.
“They don’t know what it’s like to be a slave any more than I know what it’s like to be a slave owner.”
It’s about the past, it seems, until it isn’t.
Toward the end of my conversation with Lee Millar, he had invited me to the monthly meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I arrived at a Jason’s Deli a little east of downtown just before 7 p.m. They hold t
heir monthly meetings in the conference room in the back, where a horseshoe of folding tables lined the outside of the room. The United States flag hung from a flagpole to the left of the lectern, the Confederate flag to the right. Millar had saved me the seat next to him. On my other side sat a large, friendly man named Todd, dressed in a red chamois shirt.
Todd revealed to me, on hearing my accent, that he was from Illinois—a carpetbagger, too. Later he would explain to me how, as a Midwesterner, he came to be involved with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. After marrying a Southern woman and happily making a home in Shelby County, he was invited along to a weekend Civil War reenactment. The prospect of a few days in the woods with the boys seemed like enough fun. The chance to fire a civil-war era cannon sweetened the deal (he did it twice, at $15 a pop). But the clincher was the Sunday service in a clapboard church house: a short sermon, no more than ten minutes, on the parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders. At the conclusion, one of the men came forward to say, “I am Nathan Bedford Forrest and I have built my house on sand.” The reenactment of Forrest seeing the light had reflected that light onto Todd. He was hooked. So here he was.
That night’s speaker, scheduled to lecture on the Battle of Okolona, hadn’t shown. He was on bed rest, announced the camp commander, Alan Doyle—doctor’s orders in advance of an urgent coronary artery surgery. The fallback plan was a no-brainer. Since it was the 157th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, we would instead have a roundtable discussion in which we were invited to stand up and share what we knew about those first shots of the war. Many of the participants blamed Lincoln for baiting the South into battle. When a man in a black Henley asked about the fates of other Federal forts in the South, someone referenced Fort Jefferson, on the Florida Gulf Coast which, he reminded us, once held Dr. Mudd—the doctor who had harbored John Wilkes Booth and reset his broken leg, an injury he suffered fleeing Ford’s Theatre after murdering the president. There was an outbreak of approving murmurs.
And on it went.
After some housekeeping agenda items, the camp commander ceded the floor to a member who, after apologizing for not being very active recently, sought the camp’s recommendation: His pastor, along with 150 other clergy in the city, had signed a letter in support of the removal of Memphis’s Confederate monuments. He had sent an email to his pastor, citing scripture that asked who was he to judge, but the pastor’s reply, a request to be at peace, was unsatisfactory. He was now in search of a new church. He thanked the camp in advance and took his seat. There was a beat of silence before another member spoke up.
“Me, too.”
Then another.
And another.
One man stood up to say that he has come to feel like the only real church exists between him and his King James Bible.
After a few moments of silence, someone finally suggested an Assembly of God congregation in the suburbs and the meeting moved on.
So it had come to this: feeling like they had to choose between their church and Forrest. And many in Camp 215 were choosing Forrest. It’s not that they would rather lose their church than lose the statue—they’d already lost the statue. It’s the idea, the reverence for the man, they needed. Anything less, it seems, was blasphemy.
Twenty-Six
Re-membering
The morning after the SCV meeting, I headed over to the leafy, gothic-revival campus of Rhodes College to talk with Dr. Timothy Huebner. While the Confederates of Memphis abandoned the churches that supported the statue removal, Huebner had just raised a new Forrest marker at his church and, after the previous night, I was even more eager to talk with him about it. Huebner, earnest and warm, wearing rectangular glasses and a tweed jacket, is a history professor at Rhodes and a member of Calvary Episcopal in downtown Memphis, where he’d just organized “A Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation.” The service commemorated the unveiling of his new marker about Nathan Bedford Forrest on the sidewalk of a tiny triangular park wedged between the brick-steepled church and its twenty-some parking spaces on Adams Street.
Since 1955, a marker from the Tennessee Historical Commission has stood at the corner of the parking lot, identifying the location as “Forrest’s Early Home” in Memphis where “his early business enterprises made him wealthy.” And there it stood, uncontested, for sixty years until 2015, when the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis held an interfaith vigil at the marker, drawing attention to a key omission: that those early business enterprises were in the slave trade. Dr. Huebner was at the vigil. It’s there that he first noticed the blue placard and its omissions. So began his work to tell a fuller truth about Forrest and what happened there at the corner of Adams Avenue and B.B. King Boulevard.
Soon after the vigil, the church asked Huebner to serve on a neighborhood outreach committee. “And as a professor of history, they asked me to look at the history of the neighborhood.” So Huebner, who is white, started digging.
“It didn’t take me very long in the archives to figure out that the problem with the sign was not that it didn’t simply say what his business was,” he explained. Some cursory searches yielded advertisements for Forrest’s slave mart, those “early business enterprises” from the 1850s, “and it was that ad that said Adams between Second and Third.” Adams between Second and Third? Wait a minute, he thought, that was the same block as Calvary. Could it be that the church, built in 1843, once sat next to Forrest’s slave yard?
He kept digging, hunting down property records, then a city map from the 1850s. “I was always entertaining the possibility that I was wrong,” he said, wondering if maybe Forrest’s slave mart could have been across the street, where the county courthouse stands now, or perhaps the next block over. Not so. He tracked down the plot number: 373, and crossreferenced it on the map. “And that was the moment when I finally knew that this was it.” There in the Shelby County archives, bent over the map, Huebner could confirm: his church’s parking lot was not just the site of Forrest’s home, it was the site of his slave market, too.
“That really hit me for a number of reasons because I saw the extent to which the people who erected that marker in 1955 were covering up something that they knew. Because the very same records that indicate that he had a home there are the ones that indicate that his business was there,” he told me. “It’s powerful to realize what they knew and what they purposely suppressed. It’s also powerful, on a personal level, to think about the fact that the parking lot of the church is the site of where Forrest was buying and selling people.”
Forrest bought the lot at 87 Adams on the first day of February, 1854. Memphis that year was a universe expanding: The city population had doubled between 1850 and 1854. That year cotton accumulated at the city docks in bales 150 times the number of those shipped out in 1830. And, headed in the opposite direction, enslaved people spent their stopover between the upcountry and the ever-growing Deep South plantations “down the river” in cells at 87 Adams St.
Horatio Eden, who was five years old when he was sold to Forrest, later described the yard as “a kind of square stockade of high boards with two room negro houses around, say, three sides of it and high board fence too high to be scaled on the other side.” Cells lined the inside perimeter of the stockade, where those held “were all kept in these rooms, but when an auction was held or buyers came, we were brought out and paraded two by two around a circular brick walk in the center of the stockade. The buyers would stand near by and inspect us as we went by, stop us and examine us: our teeth and limbs.”
In early 1858, Forrest bought more space on Adams for his expanding business and his expanding family. He also bought several acres further out in Shelby County and a plantation in Coahoma, Mississippi. Forrest sent those men, women, and children who were not sold in the lead-up to the planting season to one or the other of these farms to turn a profit from their labor if not from their sale. He was wary of keeping so many bodies in such close quarters in the humid muck of Memphis summer. He was, after all, ne
xt door to a church. He then expanded to Vicksburg, overseeing a slave-trading operation with his brothers, bringing in whole gangs from Missouri, making a 20 percent profit on each sale. In the city alderman elections of 1858, hundreds came into the center of the stockade on Adams to nominate their representative from District Three. Forrest won their nomination and, eventually, the election.
In 1860, Forrest ran an ad in The Memphis Appeal, stating that “Persons feeling any interest to see genuine native African can be gratified by calling at the negro yard of our friend Forrest, on Adams St.” Though the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished for over fifty years by then, the ad claimed “he has for sale, among other negroes, seven direct from Congo.” The slave mart, legal and illegal, was “a perfect horror to all negroes far and near,” the New-York Tribune wrote, where Forrest and his brother beat men “until blood trickled to the ground” and women were whipped with a heavy leather thong dipped in a bucket of salt water. Over one thousand enslaved people passed through his “slave mart” each year, whose sale netted Forrest $50,000 (that’s one million dollars a year, adjusted for inflation) each year he was in business.
But, for the past sixty-three years, when anyone pulled into the parking lot for the 10 a.m. service at Calvary or waited at the nearby bus stop for the eastbound local, all they’d be invited to consider were “Forrest’s early business enterprises.”
Huebner wanted to change that.
So he began to share his findings with the church and with friends. One friend, Phyllis Aluko, a public defender in Shelby County and a board member of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, told him about her work to erect a marker at the site of the 1866 Memphis Massacre—a three-day eruption of racial violence that began as a fight between Black Union soldiers and Irish-American police officers that left 46 Black people dead, nearly 300 injured, and over 100 Black schools, houses, and churches burned. Why not erect your own marker and counter the old, obfuscating one already there? Aluko suggested. Tell the truth about the space.
Down Along with That Devil's Bones Page 19