In “small town” Alabama, the new year brought renewed calls for a local police chief affiliated with a white supremacist group to step down. Black residents of Dothan in Southeastern Alabama went before the city council back in December and again this week, saying that having the current chief Steven Parrish was like a “nightmare” and requesting that he take a hike. Parrish was appointed chief in April of last year.
At issue is Parrish’s membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Parrish started a chapter of the group in 1999-2000 because, he said, he was proud of his ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. For some reason, the debate over whether or not support for the Confederacy equals de facto support for white supremacy rages on—mainly because most supporters of the Confederacy are in denial or straight up lying about supporting white supremacy—but one thing is crystal clear: groups such as the SCV are magnets for the real, unapologetic supporters of white supremacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You can check their work on that issue here and here.
Josie Duffy wrote about reports that Dothan police planted drugs on young Black men for years back in December. Since then doubts have been raised about many of the facts in those allegations by the source of that story, a man named Jon Carroll. While raising many of those doubts, Washington Post reporter Radley Balko also just happened to mention that Dothan Police Chief Parrish named one of his sons after Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a slave trader, plantation owner, lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He also led what was called one of the worst massacres of Blacks during the Civil War at a place called Fort Pillow in Tennessee.
So yeah. I can see how this would be considered a nightmare. Clearly.