Memorial Monument For KKK Grand Wizard Planned In Alabama

[cratehorus]

Since the monument honoring Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was unveiled in a city park in 2000, critics have called it a symbol of hate. Vandals littered it with trash, pelted it with cinder blocks and tried to pull it down with ropes before it was moved to a private cemetery. Finally in March, the bust vanished. A historical society called Friends of Forrest has offered a $20,000 reward for its return, and vowed to replace it with a new bust on a taller pedestal, guarded by an iron fence and a surveillance camera.

General Forrest is recognized as a brilliant cavalry officer, he was accused of war crimes for allowing his forces to massacre black Union troops who had surrendered after the Battle of Fort Pillow in Tennessee in 1864.

Following the war, he joined the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and became its first grand wizard.

“Some people think he was one of the most successful military practitioners of the war, and say that trumps all else he did later in life,” said Brian Steel Wills, the director of the Civil War Center at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and a history professor there. “Others condemn him out of hand as evil incarnate and dismiss him. Of course, he’s far more complex than either extreme.”

“Glorifying Nathan B. Forrest here is like glorifying a Nazi in Germany,” said Rose Sanders, a lawyer and local radio host. “For Selma, of all places, to have a big monument to a Klansman is totally unacceptable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/us/fig....html?_r=1


http://www.change.org/petitions/selma-ci...o-kkk-hate (Click here to sign a petition)

[kılıç_mehmet]

Signing a petition will stop them from erecting a piece of stone?
Well, you can always go and vandalize the monument if you oppose what it stands for.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

“For Selma, of all places, to have a big monument to a Klansman is totally unacceptable.”

Tacky,pig ignorant and stupid, but probably legal. The disapproval of some radio announcer is worth jack.


Certainly gives a bit of a hint just how far some parts of the US have come in the last 40-odd years.

[5thHorseman]

Grand Wizard. Lol.

You Americans, trolling the world. Aren't you :/

(was going to insert pic, but felt sick just looking at klan members, and didn't want to sully this sight with such shit)

[Minimalist]

Forrest was a complex man and his actual status as Grand Wizard of the KKK is in dispute.

What was true was that he was one of the South's most effective cavalry commanders. Late in his life the New York Times wrote:

In 1875, Forrest demonstrated that his personal sentiments on the issue of race now differed from that of the Klan, when he was invited to give a speech before an organization of black Southerners advocating racial reconciliation, called the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association. At this, his last public appearance, he made what the New York Times described as a "friendly speech"[10] during which, when offered a bouquet of flowers by a black woman, he accepted them as a token of reconciliation between the races and espoused a radically progressive (for the time) agenda of equality and harmony between black and white Americans.[52]

There are monuments to Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis all over the south. I'd rather have this than the fucking 10 commandments on public land. We all know the bible approved of slavery.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Grand Wizard. Lol.

You Americans, trolling the world. Aren't you :/

(was going to insert pic, but felt sick just looking at klan members, and didn't want to sully this sight with such shit)

There is a tendency to see the Klan as a bunch of clownish buffoons,perhaps simply pathetic----until one remembers those ignorant,fear- ridden, dumb-as-a-bag-of- cunt-hair morons, actually used to lynch people.


CAUTION:This is ugly shit.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJX8v0sC3Q

[Phish]

Yeaaaa Alabama!!!


I'm ashamed to be human some times. Oh well i was just born on the wrong planet i guess.

[Violet]

I hate vandalism... so I say 'go ahead'. Simply because it was vandalized and (from the sounds of it) stolen.