Mississippi May Honor Early KKK Leader On Commemorative License Plate
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on February 11th, 2011 5:36 am by HL
Mississippi May Honor Early KKK Leader On Commemorative License Plate
Controversies over honoring Confederate heritage are not uncommon in the South, but some activists in Mississippi are pushing the envelope even further. The Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans is proposing a license plate that honors Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Following the Civil War, Forrest was involved with the very first incarnation of the KKK. He was so closely associated with the group’s formation that he is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the KKK’s founder — though he was quickly elected Grand Wizard, and began centralizing disparate KKK groups under his authority. He believed that while blacks were now free, they had to continue to toil quietly for white landowners. “I am not an enemy of the negro,” Forrest said. “We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have.”
Perhaps even more disturbing, however, were Forrest’s violent actions during the Civil War, specifically a massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, TN in April 1864. When Forrest died in 1877, his obituary in the New York Times described how Forrest would forever be known for slaughtering black troops that already dropped their guns:
It is in connection with one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded massacres that ever disgraced civilized warfare that his name will for ever be inseparably associated. “Fort Pillow Forrest” was the title which the deed conferred upon him, and by this he will be remembered by the present generation, and by it he will pass into history. […]
Late in March he passed into that State, and the route of his advance was marked by outrages and brutalities of the most cold-blooded character….On the 12th of April he appeared before Fort Pillow. This fort was garrisoned by 500 troops, about half of them colored. Forrest’s force numbered about 5,000 or 6,000….The garrison was seized with a panic: the men threw down their arms and sought safety in flight toward the river, in the neighboring ravine, behind logs, bushes, trees, and in fact everywhere where there was a chance for concealment. It was in vain. The captured fort and its vicinity became a human shambles….The news of the massacre aroused the whole country to a paroxysm of horror and fury.
“Seriously?” state NAACP president Derrick Johnson said when he was told about the Forrest plate. “Wow.” Johnson went on to say that “[Forrest] should be viewed in the same light that we view Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The state of Mississippi should deny any vanity tags which would highlight racial hatred in this state.”
According to the Mississippi State Department of Revenue, legislators will have to approve the license plates. There is already precedent in the South for honoring Forrest, however — amidst considerable controversy, a statue of Forrest was erected in Nashville. There is also the Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park in Benton County, TN. Defenders of Forrest note that, late in life, he quit the KKK and seemed to moderate his views on race. “If Christian redemption means anything — and we all want redemption, I think — he redeemed himself in his own time, in his own actions, in his own words,” said one defender of the license plates.
Right-Wing Islamophobe Who Doesn’t Believe In Moderate Islam Is ‘Proud’ Of Peter King’s Hearings
Our guest blogger is Charlie Eisenhood, a student at New York University and the Editor-in-Chief of the New York City-based blog NYU Local.
Last week, the New York City Council held hearings on whether or not to allow the construction of a proposed Wal-Mart in the city, one of many meetings that take place every week. However, conservative hate blogger Pamela Geller, upset that the Council is not meeting to discuss the financing of the Park 51 Islamic community center slated to be built in lower Manhattan, organized a rally at the hearing to protest the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.”
Geller has generated much of the loony, right-wing apoplectic rage about Park 51 and Islam. She compared the building of the community center to the Ku Klux Klan building a “shrine” near a black church. She also launched anti-Islamic advertisements around the country, said the community center project was the “2nd wave of the 9/11 attack,” and recently pitched a book that would discuss how to fight “creeping Sharia.” She even told the New York Times that she doesn’t believe in a “moderate Islam.”
Geller’s protest, attended by about 10 people, fizzled as she failed to interrupt the hearings with comments about Park 51. After she left, Think Progress caught up with her to ask about Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) upcoming McCarthyesque hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. Geller told us she endorsed King’s hearings. “Of course,” she told us, adding that she’s “proud” of King’s efforts:
TP: Considering your comments on the Ground Zero Mosque, are you glad to see that Peter King will be holding hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims?
GELLER: I am happy for any defense of America. And if those hearings lead to a better understanding of those that are plotting against this country, of course. As an American, of course I’m proud of any politican who is vigorously pursuing information against people that are trying to take over and overthrow America.
Watch it:
King, the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, has refused to “include all groups seen as potential domestic terrorism threats” in the hearings, choosing to focus on Muslims. Though he feigns moderation by declining to call some of the most bigoted and nasty anti-Muslim commentators as witnesses, King’s own record includes suggesting that Muslims aren’t “American” in times of war and arguing that Muslims are the “enemy amongst us.”
Of course, if the hearings were really about “pursuing information” against terrorists, King would have opened them to include all domestic terror threats, not restricting it just to Muslim Americans. King seems to justify his witch hunt with the claim that Muslims “do not cooperate” with law enforcement. In fact, they do. Bigots like Geller and King, who believes that four out of five mosques in this country are “controlled by radical Imams,” an obviously absurd claim, are using these hearings as a way to stoke Islamophobia and fear, not to root out terrorist plots.
The Los Angeles Times writes today, “[A]nti-Islamic feeling in this country is real and widespread. King’s hearings run the risk of exacerbating that.”
