There is no way a high school in Jacksonville would be named for Nathan Bedford Forrest today.
He has no Jacksonville connection. And the name is so divisive that it would detract from education of the students.
The school is an orphan with uninvolved alumni and an African-American community that considers the name offensive. The school, once all-white, had 57 percent black students at the end of the last school year.
In 2008, The Forrest School Advisory Council supported a name change, but the School Board overrode the decision.
Now there is a new SAC and new School Board. The controversy resumes.
A DIFFERENT CITY
When Nathan Bedford Forrest was chosen as the name for a new high school on Jacksonville’s Westside in 1959, racial segregation was legal.
The School Board was dragging its feet on desegregating the schools. Forrest was one of many Confederate heroes.
But Forrest was not any Confederate general. After the war, he became the poster boy for the “Lost Cause.”
That Forrest was one of the early leaders of the Ku Klux Klan apparently was not discussed in 1959. The contention of Forrest’s defenders is that the Klan was a fraternal organization that Forrest shut down once it got out of hand. He couldn’t control it.
At the very least, it was an attempt to restore white supremacy.
FORT PILLOW IS KEY
But even more important to this controversy is a battle that stirred up the nation at the time. It took place at Fort Pillow on the banks of the Mississippi River in western Tennessee. It was April 12, 1864.
Perhaps the most objective account comes from John Cimprich, professor of history at Thomas More College in Crestview Hills, Ky., author of “Fort Pillow, a Civil War massacre, and Public Memory.”
He carefully weighed evidence from Southern and Northern sources and concludes, “The Fort Pillow incident in 1864 stands out as the most famous atrocity of the nation’s bloodiest war.”
There is no doubt that scores of soldiers, many of them black, were killed after trying to surrender.
An Army investigation and a congressional probe soon after the incident produced stunning and disturbing descriptions of the killing, soldiers burned, even a few buried alive.
Since the interviews happened so quickly after the event, it is improbable that accounts could have been rehearsed or invented. Here is one example that refers to Brig. Gen. James Chalmers:
Question: “Had you any conversation with one of General Chalmers’ aides about their conduct here?”
Answer: “Yes, sir, with one who said he was an aide-de-camp to General Chalmers and a captain in the Second Missouri cavalry. He told me that they did not recognize Negroes as United States soldiers but would shoot them and show them no quarter — neither the Negroes nor their officers.”
For those not inclined to believe these accounts, Cimprich finds convincing evidence from a few Southern sources.
Confederate Sgt. Achilles Clark wrote a letter to his sisters that graphically described a massacre. “General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs.”
As Cimprich writes, “It seems unbelievable that a committed Confederate could have any reason for falsely accusing his comrades of perpetuating a massacre.”
Also, a Mobile, Ala. newspaper reported “an indiscriminate slaughter.”
In a phone interview, Cimprich summed up Forrest’s involvement this way: He did not start the Fort Pillow massacre, he probably allowed it to continue and then he ordered that it be stopped.
So if Forrest was such a great general, why did he lose control of his men in the first place?
Historian Brian Steel Wills wrote, “these men acted as they believed their general would want them to act. In a sense, the men became extensions of their commander.”
One witness said, “General Forrest issued an order not to kill any more Negroes because they wanted them to help to haul the artillery out.”
Formal retaliation for Fort Pillow never took place, though President Abraham Lincoln drafted a retaliation document that he never executed.
“Fort Pillow remained an obstacle to the Southern mythology of the Lost Cause, and thus a special object of Dixie revisionism,” writes Andrew Ward in “River Run Red.”
“The massacre tainted the Southern whites’ campaign to romanticize and ennoble the Confederate cause, to deprecate slavery as its root, to wax nostalgic about the days when slave and slaveholders’ ‘hearts were young and gay.’ ”
Historians will long debate what happened at Fort Pillow.
But our task is simpler. Should the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest belong on a Jacksonville high school?
There is enough evidence to answer clearly: No. The name is poisoned.
And the evidence is convincing enough to say confidently that this magnet of controversy will never go away until the name is replaced.
Times have changed regarding race, mostly for the better.
It’s time to find a new name, a new identity and a symbol that everyone in Jacksonville can embrace.