Nathan B. Forrest: Hero or Villain?

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17 Dec 2013, 1:23 pm

Time for another in our "Hero or Villain" series.

This just in:

http://news.yahoo.com/kkk-grand-wizard- ... 19815.html

Quote:

High school named after KKK 'grand wizard' to be renamed

Florida high school named after a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan is getting a new name after a campaign to change it went viral.

The Duval County Public School Board voted unanimously Monday to rename Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville.

More than 170,000 people signed an online petition launched by a local resident urging the school board to rename the school.

"The people who live here deserve better," Ty Richmond wrote in his petition. "I don't want my daughter, or any student, going to a school named under those circumstances. This is a bad look for Florida — with so much racial division in our state, renaming Forrest High would be a step toward healing."

The petition continued: "It is especially troubling that more than half of Forrest High attendees are African American — the school is named for someone who would have kept their ancestors enslaved and who helped lead an organization, the KKK, that went on to terrorize, intimidate, and disenfranchise Black people for nearly a century. Naming a public high school for so divisive a figure is a relic of a bygone era — a legacy that must be actively rejected. I urge you to reject the legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest by renaming Forrest High immediately."

In response, the Washington Post reported, the KKK wrote a letter to the board urging it to keep the name.

The high school was named after Forrest, a Confederate general and the KKK's first "grand wizard," in 1959. In 2007, the school board voted 5-2 in favor of keeping the school's name.

But on Monday, Duval County Superintendent Nikolai Vitti acknowledged it was time.

"If you look at the history of the naming of Nathan B. Forrest High School, the students originally wanted the school to be named Valhalla," Vitti said. "Politics reigned, and as a response to desegregation and the civil rights movement, the school was named Nathan B. Forrest. That was not the will of the students, and considering the opinion of the students in this process, I think it is an opportunity to give voice to students whose voices were not heard in the beginning and can certainly be heard now."

"I'm very encouraged," Richmond told Action News Jacksonville. "Jacksonville is too much of a beautiful city to have that ugly blemish."

So, was Nathan Forrest a hero, and naming a school after him a proper tribute? Or, was Nathan Forrest a villain, such that naming a public school after him was a blemish on humanity?

CSBurks
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17 Dec 2013, 2:52 pm

I wouldn't exactly call him a hero.

Moviefan2k4
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17 Dec 2013, 3:17 pm

I can understand why students at a dominantly-black school would be opposed, and I doubt facts would comfort them very much. Yes, Nathan Forrest was a member of the KKK for a brief period, but he didn't start it. He actually left that despicable group behind, after realizing their main motives were personally hateful instead of political. He died about ten years after originally joining the group, which he actually sought to disband six years earlier.

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17 Dec 2013, 10:17 pm

Similar event in Memphis.
http://youtu.be/SUnobHHAKxo

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17 Dec 2013, 11:45 pm

Moviefan2k4 wrote:

Hm, I could have sworn he was one of the Klan's founders. Regardless, the man was still a vicious white supremacist, terrorizing both freed blacks and the so called carpet baggers working for the Freedman's Bureau. Jacksonville can do better in naming their schools.

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ArrantPariah
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18 Dec 2013, 10:32 am

I think that Northerners tend to view the members of the Confederacy (such as Mr. Forrest) as villains, while White southerners view them as heroes. I wonder how Black Southerners view them? I'm guessing with a certain degree of ambivalence. They are treated to the same public school curricula, which define the members of the Confederacy as heroes, and generally put the Northerners in a bad light. So, I'm guessing that many Southern Blacks probably they think that it is all just a bunch of White stuff, of no relevance to them.

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18 Dec 2013, 11:56 am

Misslizard wrote:

Similar event in Memphis.
http://youtu.be/SUnobHHAKxo

Kraichgauer
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18 Dec 2013, 4:42 pm

Misslizard wrote:

Similar event in Memphis.
http://youtu.be/SUnobHHAKxo

I thought it was funny that the head of the local Klan lived in a trailer.
The again, he and his bunch give people in trailer parks a bad name.
The Crips were inconvenienced by the rain? Well, at least I noticed that they were a bit more inclusive with their planned counter rally, in that some of the gangstas had white girlfriends, and they even welcomed a white guy in who appears to have just been strolling by - I take it because he had tattoos.

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18 Dec 2013, 5:05 pm

And Southerners still whine about Sherman... :roll:

link

Quote:

The Battle of Fort Pillow, known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, particularly in the North, was fought on April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Henning, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. The battle generated great controversy about a massacre of surrendered African-American troops conducted or condoned by Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Military historian David J. Eicher concluded, "Fort Pillow marked one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history."

Quote:

Conflicting reports of what happened next, from 16:00 to dusk, led to the controversy. Union sources claimed that even though the Union troops surrendered, Forrest's men massacred them in cold blood. Surviving members of the garrison said that most of their men surrendered and threw down their arms, only to be shot or bayoneted by the attackers, who repeatedly shouted, "No quarter! No quarter!"[7] The Joint Committee On the Conduct of the War immediately investigated the incident and concluded that the Confederates shot most of the garrison after it had surrendered. A 2002 study by Albert Castel concluded that the Union forces were indiscriminately massacred after Fort Pillow "had ceased resisting or was incapable of resistance."[8]

Lieutenant Daniel Van Horn of the 6th U. S. Heavy Artillery (Colored) stated in his official report "There never was a surrender of the fort, both officers and men declaring they never would surrender or ask for quarter." However, a Confederate sergeant, in a letter written home shortly after the battle said that "the poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hand scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and then shot down."[9]

The fact that Forrest was a military genius -- particularly with cavalry -- gives Forrest's postbellum career a curious ending. He wrote a letter to Sherman, General of the Army during Grant's presidency, seeking a commission. Sherman wrote him a very polite reply and said if it were up to him he'd offer Forrest a commission on the spot. But, that, alas, politics prevented from him doing it. But had there been a war in the 1870s or 1880s -- and there were definite rumblings about a US invasion of Canada at that time -- Forrest would very probably have been a high ranking officer in a blue uniform. He definitely sought such a thing. And Sherman was definitely not averse to seeing it happen, under the right circumstances.

Curious world we live in, but no more curious than the world of the past, at least sometimes.

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WorldsEdge
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18 Dec 2013, 5:12 pm

Oh, and FWIW I can't think of Forrest as anything other than a man of his age and upbringing, neither hero nor villain. I don't think he ordered what did in fact happen at Fort Pillow, nor even particularly condone it. But I also don't think he went very much out of his way to stop it, either.

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18 Dec 2013, 6:03 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:

Misslizard wrote:

Similar event in Memphis.
http://youtu.be/SUnobHHAKxo

They also seemed to live in houses.

Dox47
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18 Dec 2013, 9:16 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:

IIRC, he did found it, or was one of the founders, but later disbanded it after it became too violent for him, and it reformed on it's own without him.

BTW, did you know that part of highway 99 here in Washington is properly called the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway? Little known local Confederate tribute.

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18 Dec 2013, 10:20 pm

I've mention before that there is a good pie named for Jeff Davis.

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18 Dec 2013, 11:13 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Kraichgauer wrote:

I did not know that about a Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. How the hell did we end up with that? And a more important question: why?

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20 Dec 2013, 1:26 am

How about adding the option of "irrelevant" to the poll?
People are wringing their hands over a man who has been dead for 136 years.
I don't know whey they named that school after N.B. Forest in the first place since he was not from Florida and did not live there. Either way, it's something for the people of Jacksonville to decide on.

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20 Dec 2013, 4:29 am

Raptor wrote:

I don't know whey they named that school after N.B. Forest in the first place since he was not from Florida and did not live there. Either way, it's something for the people of Jacksonville to decide on.

Apparently, they named the school after N.B. Forrest in 1959 in defiance of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, where SCOTUS ruled segregated schools unconstitutional.

http://www.metrojacksonville.com/articl ... ame-change
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/11/10 ... nder-name/

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