Sick To My Stomach - Memphis City Council is Illegally Removing Historic Statue

It does sound like a risky gamble that could cost them.

On the other side of the coin am I the only one thinking many of the people who are complaining about this sale are the same ones who wanted the Fed to sell off it's national parks to the criminal Bundy family because local land owners and states rights should have been more powerful than federal rights so we could give land over to the people who took up arms against our federal government in a failed standoff that was pushing for a nationwide revolt? I just think it is a little ironic that each time these people back the armed taking of us land and declaring it sovereign for the sake of some rich white farming dudes who don't like what the government was doing. In this case it is really amusing how they screwed over those rich white guys by selling the land to private business and that government that they hate so much is what they were trying to use to keep the statues.

It is all very convoluted when we end up dealing with armed secessionists.

Here is why I don't like a trick like this. The taxpayers elect representatives who could change the laws and remove the statue. Electing some representatives who wanted a more racially diverse and honest representation of the US and it's people would be something all of Tennessee would benefit from. This would be a reason for local black people to go vote out the racists in their government and fight harder to make things better, which is needed. Instead if this goes by the way of a loophole you leave the old bullshit racist government in place and the only change is a cosmetic one and black people and non racist whites do not insert themselves into the system and make it theirs.

There is a real problem in the south of whitewashing and racism. There is also a problem with the black community avoiding voting and responsibility within government because government is considered the problem. This just leaves government as the problem where if you did it the hard way of getting decent representatives in by fighting racist ideas and whitewashing you would have really improved the system. Now there is less reason to because the problem is less visible. That is where racism testers underground and we get shocked when Donald trump is elected on a wave of white nationalism we thought was a lot more dead than that.

You don't think Blacks in Memphis and Shelby County vote? Believe me...they vote. Early, often, and posthumously.

No justice for heroic Confederate leaders.

Every TN based article I've read on this says that the city didn't violate the state's sunshine laws. They could be wrong, of course, and enforcement of sunshine laws in this state hasn't exactly been stellar, so even if they did violate them, there may be no consequences for doing so.

Poodle, however, can take comfort that this statue of his ancestor:



Is in a private park, and thus in no danger of coming down any time soon.

I've got no problem with the removal of the statue(s) or the graves (provided they're relocated to a proper cemetery of the family's choosing.) However, I think how the City of Memphis went about it was questionable at best, illegal at worst. Imagine any other instance of a City Councilman voting to sell a piece of City property to a company he owns at an extremely undervalued price. We would all be rightly be up in arms screaming about graft and malfeasance.

Ayup. I don't blame the city for doing what they're doing, but I'm not at all happy with the method. Even if it is legal.

You are welcome to hold a jury trial in the city but I doubt you will get any convictions.

You and I both know those parks will be sold back by the end of the month. Either that or put into some sort of public trust.

This is how Memphis always operated when I lived there. Openly shifty.

The city didn’t even own the land. They were allowed to use it.

Is this a Back To The Future type thing where now that Poodles ancestor is being wiped from history he too will start to fade away?

A. removing a statue does not by definition desecrate a grave.
B. a statue is not necessary for a grave, most don't have them.
C. Moving a grave is also not desecration, it is in fact a fairly common occurrence.
D. given how many Native American gravesites and sacred sites white people pissed on, we're hardly on the high moral ground on that subject anyway
E. your beloved ancestor killed people in defense of the right to own people and raised his hand in violence against the constitution and the flag (the flag which you get pissed off about people kneeling before) - fuck him.

the snowflake seems to be melting

if the statue is meant to honor the redeemed Christian man advocating for the oppressed why is he...mounted in uniform on his horse in the midst of killing people in defense of slavery?

Also, the statue went up in 1905 while whites were busy reminding blacks of "their place" in the world of Jim Crow

I sense another name change coming...

Nathan Bedford Robert E Stonewall Jefferson Beauregard Ron Paul Davis Jackson Lee Forrest at your service ma'am.

From our town, southeast in the general direction of Brice's Crossroads, there's a highway that loseley tracks the route e supposedly took to arrive at that battle that has been designated the Nathan Bedford Forrest memorial highway.

The dude who owns a local Facebook "news" group suggested local authorities try to obtain the statue and place it near the highway.

Yeah....fuck that noise.

couldn't have ended any more poorly

remembered this from the aftermath of Charlottesville, one of the epic Twitter threads of all time:
--------------------------
LibrarianShipwreck‏ @libshipwreck

As a historian the hardest part of my job is that I am constantly building statues, as statues are the only way people learn about history.
11:07 AM - 17 Aug 2017
***
Replying to @libshipwreck

Little known fact, but most of what you learn when you pursue a PhD in history is actually just how to build and install statues.
31 replies 1,553 retweets 8,550 likes

Just the other day I was discussing dissertation ideas with my advisor and she said "pick a different topic, there isn't a statue of this."
26 replies 1,086 retweets 7,105 likes

The phrase "pre-history" derives from a German word meaning "periods of history that didn't leave statues behind so who knows what happened"
15 replies 1,248 retweets 6,952 likes

Last year I did a ton of archival research only to have a conference reject my paper for: "failure to cite a statue."
Harsh but fair!
21 replies 1,010 retweets 6,943 likes

How do we know that Don Quixote & Rocky are real historic figures, and not fictional characters?
Easy: because there are statues of them!
40 replies 1,445 retweets 7,681 likes

How do historians know that F. Kafka's father was a terrifying headless monster & that Franz rode on his shoulders?
Because of the statue!
22 replies 818 retweets 5,652 likes

There are some who ask "which came first: the history or the statue?"
But those people are philosophers and you should probably ignore them.
24 replies 1,200 retweets 6,981 likes

Some argue that you can learn about history from books & other non-statue materials. But who has ever heard of learning from a book? No one!
42 replies 1,263 retweets 6,084 likes

If a statue comes down it becomes impossible to know what happened in the past. No historian will dare make a claim without statue evidence.
46 replies 1,212 retweets 6,012 likes

Don't we all know the famed adage: "if you want to be remembered, do something important - but also build a statue of it"?
We do!
11 replies 390 retweets 3,808 likes

Historians have been calling for a return to "statue based" education for years, but skills like "looking at statues" have been devalued.
25 replies 833 retweets 5,063 likes

In conclusion: taking down statues permanently alters the space-time continuum (unless you build a statue of the other statue coming down).
182 replies 1,508 retweets 7,943 likes

Who owned it?

Answering my own question, according to the Shelby County Assessor of Property, it was indeed (still is? ) owned by the city...unless the City of Memphis Parks Commission isn't part of the City of Memphis.
Property Record Card

Hey, stop making me want to pray.

Let's replace the statue with a leaky oil pipeline!

It seems the grave could be moved back to its original site.

Dump it in the ocean near Bin Ladin's.

I think that was the plan the first time. I assume that's where Forrest wanted to be buried anyway.

Not that it matters to him anymore.

We know.

By God!

If you're going to pray, pray to Iyhara. She's not a dick like God

In some places the parks department is not part of city government. It's a separate entity with their own taxes and everything.