They're Throwing the Lawless Traitor Out of the Place Where Laws Are Made

[aubiefifty 16,931]

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From Esquire

You can dismiss the movement to remove Confederate monuments from the public square as a kind of aesthetic justice. Isn't this a new paint job for a crumbling house? And it's very much true that throwing Robert E. Lee's likeness in the river—or in a museum accompanied by proper historical context—does little to change the fact that the average white household controls 10 times more wealth than the average Black family does. It doesn't change who gets a decent loan and who doesn't. It doesn't address the collapsing school systems in overwhelmingly segregated neighborhoods, or the school-to-prison pipeline, or the fact that Black Americans face harsher treatment at every stage of the criminal-justice system: policing, arrest, charges, conviction, sentencing.

But it isn't an empty gesture. These statues were put up for a reason. They were placed in the halls of government or at the local courthouse or towering above the town square to communicate that the racial hierarchy their subjects fought for—one where Black Americans were pronounced less than fully human so that they could be denied the rights of citizenship—is alive and well. Some people make the rules around here, the statues tell us, and other people live under them. They were dressed up in the iconography of heroism, just as the core animating force of the Confederacy—white supremacy—was in the decades after papered over with Lost Cause mythology, false history that held up traitors to the American republic as heroes. But the underlying message was clear, which is why every time one of these monuments is set to come down, the white supremacists show up to demand it be kept up. It's not a coincidence that the KKK showed up in Charlottesville.

Speaking of the Ku Klux Klan, the halls of the Tennessee state capitol will no longer host a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest. He was a former slave trader who became a Confederate lieutenant general accused of various atrocities, particularly at Fort Pillow. Already not a guy who needs a statue. After he lost the war—it's important to remember these people were losers—Forrest went on to become the Klan's first Grand Wizard. This guy ran the Ku Klux Klan, and they put his statue in the state legislature...in 1978. The state's capitol commission voted to remove the bust on Thursday, which is a big deal considering the same measure failed in 2017. It also seems like a big deal to these folks.

Nathan's headed for a museum, which is a win, even if it's hard to discern the historical value of a statue glorifying a Confederate psycho that was put up when Jimmy Carter was president. It's a victory because a monument to a traitor to the American republic, who then turned to racial terrorism, has no place in the building where laws are made. Forrest and his fellow travelers are icons of lawlessness, of violence in service to power. Honoring them is incompatible with building a just society where all citizens are equal before that same law, and can claim the full rights of citizenship. Justice is not made beneath the leering gaze of a world-historical monster. It's a first step, but it cannot be the last one.

 

in fairness i read a biography and whether truth or lies it said bedford spent the latter parts of his lies defending slaves in court and trying to help them rise from their current station in life. this of course could be hogwash but i read it. they also claimed the massacre was a mistake that got out of hand and he was not even there. they said he owned slaves but was fair and never broke families up. i would love to know the truth but man that is a lot of digging. one thing everyone can agree on is he was one of the bravest men to fight in the civil war. again i am just throwing this out there to be fair and in no way justifying slavery at all.