Last weekend it was Charlottesville, Virginia.
This weekend it was Memphis, Tennessee.
And 154 years and 354 days since the second battle of Manassas Junction, the emerging battlefield of America vs. the New Confederacy moved to the junction of Manassas Street and Union Avenue in Memphis.
In front of local and international media, police arrested seven citizens among those who were around the statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest including some who attempted to place a “Black Lives Matter” banner upon the legs of Forrest’s bronze horse King Phillip.
TAKE ‘EM DOWN 901
Organized around a social media site “#takeemdown901,” more than 300 people rallied in the park which contains Forrest’s statue above the remains of him and his wife – but which no longer bears his name, having been changed to “Health Sciences Park” in 2013. Forrest was a slave trader and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
As the banner went up, police charged the statue, pushed and punched some citizens and pulled down others as they began roughly arresting them.
The crowd chanted, “Police and the Klan go hand in hand,” and “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police.”
DEFENDING THE STATUE
Citizens were angry that police, including city of Memphis cops and UT police, seemed to be defending the “honor” of the statue over the First Amendment. There was no physical damage being done to the statue, mind you – nothing like spray-painting the 9,500-pound bronze idol or beating it with a hammer.
A University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center police car pulled forward into citizens who were attempting to block the car from leaving with one of those arrested. Then the driver quickly shifted into reverse and cut her wheels, striking other citizens and media including our cameraman who were standing beside the car.
“You could have left that sheet up there for five minutes, and everybody would have dispersed, then taken it down later,” Bill Stegall shouted toward a line of police as blue lights lined Union Avenue and a handcuffed citizen was being put in a car.
“Instead, you confronted us, you physically challenged us. You came out here and started pushing and shoving, and you could have just let it go. They shoved me and they pushed me, and you could have left the sheet up for five minutes. This was unnecessary.”
ORGANIZERS SPEAK, PREACHERS PREACH
The arrests followed remarks by ministers, representatives of Shelby County Young Democrats, Black Lives Matter and others.
“We are here to continue to raise our voices to the city of Memphis administration, Mayor Strickland and the city council, the state of Tennessee and Governor Haslam, the Tennessee Historical Commission, for the immediate removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue,” said event organizer Tami Sawyer, who wore a cold pack around her neck to combat the 94-degree heat.
“Our mission remains clear. We know that equity does not exist in the city of Memphis,” said Sawyer, who told the crowd that even after the statues come down, citizens will continue to deal with issues including racial injustice, economic equality, equal education, transportation and jobs.
“The Memphis that we want is a Memphis for all,” Sawyer said.
“We are here to remove these racist statutes that were built way after the Civil War as vehicles of oppression and intimidation. The Jefferson Davis statue was built (in 1964) to let the city of Memphis know they would not integrate the schools.
“The Nathan Bedford Forrest statue was built (in 1905) to come against the Beale Street Merchants Association which was the economic center of black business. These statues were placed strategically, and they were placed with hatred and intimidation.”
Sawyer rallied the crowd to chant, “Take ‘em down.”
“No more hate in Charlottesville. No more hate in Durham. No more hate in Birmingham. No more hate in New Orleans. No more hate in St. Louis. No more hate in Indiana. No more hate in Montana. No more hate in Memphis. No more hate in Memphis,” Sawyer exhorted statue opponents.
MOUNTING FORREST
Some citizens later scrambled up the monument to the platform which bears Forrest and horse, and using long, wooden dowell rods purchased at Home Depot, attempted to cover the statue with a large tarp which included the message, “Take ‘em Down 901.” That effort got as far as covering the top of Forrest’s head – it looked like a Klan hood – before the tarp slipped off the poles. Police moved in with a warning -- but the sentiment seemed somewhat cordial at that point as smiles were exchanged between police and activists.
Police coverage at first came chiefly from the UTHSC police department, which has jurisdiction over the park, the UT campus and surrounding streets. They staged up mainly on the western edge of the park. Later, as the rally continued, MPD showed up with more than a dozen cars staging under shade trees on the eastern edge of the park.
When members of the crowd stepped upon the first level of the monument and made a semi-circle while holding a banner, police came up and took away the tarp and put it in the trunk of an MPD cruiser.
“Symbols like this matter,” said Rev. Earle Fisher. “Symbols like this represent hate and bigotry, white supremacy, injustice. Since symbols like this are so full of hell, we need to get them the hell out of our public spaces.”
“We aren’t naïve,” Fisher said. “Check our receipts. We didn’t just show up to take the statue down. We showed up to say, stop killing our kids in the streets. We showed up to say a child in Whitehaven deserves to get as good an education as a child in Germantown.
“And we ain’t going to stop at a statue. We’re coming for the whole system of white supremacy and hatred and bigotry and all of it.”
Then came the effort to place a “Black Lives Matter” banner around the horse’s legs.
The rally took place one week after a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville killed Heather Heyer and injured 20 more persons when he sped his car into a crowd that was countering a massive demonstration that included Kluxers, saluting neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
FREE SPEECH OR LAWBREAKING?
One person’s free speech is another person’s lawbreaking, apparently — although we all know that laws are selectively enforced. What law enforcement does not seem to grasp is that “protesters” blow off steam, then after a while — especially in 94-degree heat — everybody gets tired, winds down and wants to go home. If police would give First Amendment practitioners a little elbow room, things would get resolved peacefully on their own. When police use their go-to move of aggression, it only heightens emotions. Often it’s only after police provoke or confront citizens that things go awry. Why is that so hard to figure out?
If people were hitting one another and fighting, or if people were trying to melt the horse’s tail with a blow torch, there would have been no ambivalence about police command deciding to move in. But, wrapping a banner around the thing is not damaging it. And, for anyone who brings up that this is a grave site, everybody knows the grave is not the thing — it’s the horse and rider and all it stood for when it was erected in 1905 and what it stands for today. If the horse and rider are gone and people stomp on the grave and put stuff on it, then get back to me.
Although UTHSC police have jurisdiction over the park and surrounding streets, MPD Deputy Chief Terry Landrum led law enforcement. About 15 UTHSC officers supplanted law enforcement presence. At the end of the day, there were about 50 MPD officers on the scene. We had met Landrum at a community policing event in June, but on this day we were focused on filming near the speakers, and we could not find him after things broke loose.
Casually attired and riding a three-wheel motorcycle, UTHSC Chief of Police Anthony Berryhill stayed out of the fray and took in the scene from the eastern edge of the park. We questioned the wisdom of arresting those citizens, who were not damaging the statue or physically harming any persons, as we exist in the context of heightened political tensions and poor police-community relations.
“I don’t know what made them make the arrests, but obviously something made them feel it was necessary. You can’t keep climbing on the statue,” said Berryhill, an MPD veteran who retired as second in command of the Memphis department of police services on Dec. 31, 2015.
“You can protest, but you got to do it peacefully. Climbing on the statue only gets you worked up to do more. You can’t do it. From a police platform, we look at it like is any laws being broken. You can’t let people break the law.”
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
Besides a full complement of local media, a Dutch film crew was in town to cover the controversy of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue.
“We came here to Memphis to cover this story around this statue,” said Liz Pellikaan, a reporter who led a crew for NOS-TV, a station near Amsterdam that is linked to a European network.
“We weren’t aware, when we arrived a couple of days ago, that this was going to happen. But obviously covering the discussion or the ongoing dispute of this statue here, we wanted to hear what the people had to say and why they feel like it should be taken down.”
Here is a link to her story.
GOVERNMENT ACTIONS
In 2015 the Memphis City Council voted to remove the statue. But, due to a law inserted by the Republican Tennessee legislature in 2013, that decision was superseded by the Tennessee Historical Commission, which refused to allow it. Mayor Jim Strickland has said he supports removing the statue but that he does not want to violate any laws or rulings to do it.
On Memorial Day, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, we trekked to Health Sciences Park in search of the “history” that supporters of the statues claim they represent. Here is our DailyKos story from that visit.
The Memphis-made documentary Who Will Watch the Watchers? will have its World Premiere in Los Angeles Sept. 16 at the Justice on Trial Film Festival, and it will “Tennessee Premiere” Sept. 28 at the University of Memphis.