The City Council off Memphis voted 9-0 Tuesday to approve temporary new names for three parks that honored the Confederacy. The former names were Forrest Park, Confederate Park and Jefferson Davis Park. You might wonder why after all this time Memphis, a city with a majority African American population suddenly decided now to change the names. The reason was simple: The Tennessee legislature recently proposed a bill called the “Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013” that would prohibit
[L]ocal governments from changing the name of any “statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, plaque, historic flag display, school, street, bridge,building, park preserve, or reserve which has been erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of, any historical military figure, historical military event, military organization, or military unit.”
In effect, one could call this the Tennessee White Traitors’ Heritage Act. No doubt that is how many Memphis citizens who aren’t white would view it. Thus the City Council sought to make a pre-emptive move to change the names of the parks now, before state law made it impossible to do so. Unfortunately, that didn’t sit well with one group who is well known for its adherence to the “heritage” of that particularly ugly chapter in our history: The Ku Klux Klan.
February 7, 2013 (MEMPHIS, Tenn.) (WLS) — The Ku Klux Klan says it is planning the largest rally ever held in Memphis, Tennessee.
The group is upset that three city parks are being renamed. Among them is a park where one of the Klan’s founders is memorialized. […]
The statue of Confederate fighter Nathan Bedford Forrest astride a horse towers above the Memphis park bearing his name. It’s a larger-than-life tribute to the warrior still admired by many for fiercely defending the South in the Civil War – and scorned by others for a slave-trading past and ties to the Klan. […]
Kennith Van Buren, a local African-American civil rights activist, said stripping away park names tied to the Confederacy or its leading figures were overdue.
“It’s very offensive,” he said. “How can we have unity in the nation when we have one city, right here in Memphis, which fails to be unified?”
A video of the report by a local station, WMC-TV, televised last night, can be seen here:
Action News 5 – Memphis, Tennessee
The Klan spokesperson, who spoke to WMC-TV, refused to identify himself, instead going by the moniker, the Exalted Cyclops. He “promised” that thousands of Klansmen from all over the country will hold a rally in Memphis, and that it would be the largest rally in Memphis, Tennessee history, though no date for this proposed rally was given.
I support the changing of the names of Memphis city parks. The current names honor the greatest treason in our nation’s history, the leader of that insurrection, and a Civil War general who was a slave trader and the founder of the KKK. Obviously the members of the Memphis City Council must feel that the majority of the citizens they represent support that action also, or they wouldn’t have voted unanimously to make the name changes now.
I also support the KKK’s right to peacefully protest the name changes in the exercise of their First Amendment rights, even if I vehemently disagree with their racist ideology. Let’s hope someone in Memphis organizes a counter-protest that dwarfs the turnout by the current iteration of the KKK.
