The fact that statues are falling all across the US and the UK is invigorating and inspiring to me. I wrote about a Confederate monument being toppled in my comedy “Bamboozled.” In that play, it’s a figure of Nathan Bedford Forrest, failed Confederate soldier, murderer, and KKK Grand Dragon.
The state of Tennessee wrote and enforced laws that de facto ensured these statues stayed up, despite community pleas to remove them. In Memphis, a nonprofit called Memphis Greenspace, actually bought two parks from the City of Memphis, a strategy that allowed the statues to be taken down from its private property.
But late last year the Sons of the Confederacy acquired three statues: the Jefferson Davis statue and the James Mathis bust removed from Fourth Bluff Park on Front Street, and the General Nathan Bedford Forrest monument, taken down at Health Sciences Park. They said in late 2019 that they will erect them somewhere in public view.
Hmmm. I wonder if they still feel the same way today.
photo: The Smithsonian