Government

Tennessee Legislature Cancel Cultures Historical Commission For Crime Of Canceling Klan Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest

For 'history,' obviously.

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A different Nathan Bedford Forrest statue (Brent Moore/CC By SA 2.0 [Creative Commons])

Who in the year 2021 is actually defending the Ku Klux Klan?

That should be a rhetorical question, but sadly it is not, since members of the Tennessee legislature are fighting mad that the state’s Historical Commission relocated a bust of the Confederate General and Klan Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest from its place of prominence in the capitol to the Tennessee State Museum.

“In our culture today it seems there is a desire to cancel history, cancel culture, cancel narratives that are just based on fact. I think that that’s a dangerous precedent,” Tullahoma Republican Senator Janice Bowling told Nashville’s WTVF. The Senator failed to explain why it was imperative that the government perpetuate a narrative embodied by an infamous racist who slaughtered hundreds of Black and White Union troops at the Fort Pillow Massacre and went on to symbolize the vicious repression of Blacks in the postbellum South.

“Forrest represents pain, suffering and brutal crimes committed against African Americans, and that pain is very real for our fellow Tennesseans as they walk the halls of our statehouse and evaluate how he could be one of just the nine busts elevated to a place of reverence,” Republican Governor Bill Lee told the Historical Society when he testified in support of removing the statue.

And yet, members of the state’s upper house are so furious that they’re seeking to dissolve the Historical Commission in its entirety and replace it with a new body more to their liking. While the current Commission is comprised of 24 members, including the state’s historian, librarian, archaeologist, archivist, and commissioner of environment and conservation, with the rest being gubernatorial appointees, they’ve proposed a bill to create a new, twelve-person Commission with nine members appointed directly by state legislative leaders.

This bill removes the present law requirement concerning the academic credentials of certain appointees to the commission. This bill also removes present law that encourages the appointing authority to appoint members who are diverse in age and racial background.

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Nice, huh?

The measure has support in both houses of the legislature, which are under supermajority Republican control. It passed out of the Senate Government Operations Committee yesterday on a 5-4 vote and is scheduled for debate on March 23 in the House Departments and Agencies Subcommittee.

Because the past is never dead, it’s not even past.

Bill would remove all members of the historical commission [WFTV]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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