The debate over renaming Nathan Bedford Forrest High School has generated unusually inaccurate representations of the past.
Two issues have been singled out: the actions of Forrest's troops at Fort Pillow, Tenn. in 1864 and Forrest's involvement with the Ku Klux Klan.
The most authoritative assessment by a professional historian, John Cimprich's Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory concludes that Confederate troops did massacre black Union troops at Fort Pillow in 1864.
Black soldiers died at rates twice as high as that of the white soldiers inside the fort. Evidence from Confederates and surviving Union soldiers demonstrates that Confederates killed black soldiers before they surrendered. Nothing suggests that this was a premeditated act, but that hardly lessens its shame. This was not an isolated incident, as recent books on Civil War atrocities make plain.
The North's decision to enlist and arm black men to fight against the South enraged white Southerners, and Confederates responded with acts of personal violence at Fort Pillow, Saltville, the Crater and numerous other engagements.
Forrest was the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It has been noted that he resigned from the Klan after it became more violent. This action suggests that there was some "acceptable" or benign KKK. Such an institution never existed. The KKK sought to deny blacks the right to participate in the civic life of the South.
Like modern terrorist groups, they used both premeditated and random violence to terrify and isolate a subject population. They were supported by white Southerners, and even after their ostensible destruction by federal legal efforts in the 1870s, Klan cells continued to target black leaders through the Democratic Party.
The most important date in this controversy is 1959, the year that the School Board commemorated Forrest by naming a school after him. That act came in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, which required the desegregation of school facilities across the country.
It stands as a parting shot in the debate over access to public education and should be repudiated today.
In recent weeks, guest writers in the Times-Union have referred to Forrest as a "civil rights advocate" and a "humane" slave trader. These descriptions are historical absurdities.
The above statements reflect desperate attempts to remake Forrest in our values. This is not just an impossibility but intellectually and morally dishonest. As our society changes, so do our values.
Slave traders made their living literally off the flesh of others; there was nothing humane in the practice, as scholarship over the past 40 years has amply demonstrated.
After the Civil War, few white Northerners and even fewer white Southerners worked to protect the rights of black Americans. The federal government abandoned blacks to the violence and ostracism of the Jim Crow South.
Nathan Bedford Forrest does not represent the values of our day. Does this mean that we should forget him? No, but neither should we commemorate him.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean is assistant professor of history at the University of North Florida where he teaches Civil War and Southern history.