Forrest's Remains, the National Confederate Museum and Racist Hate

So, they’re digging up old Nathan Bedford Forrest over in Memphis. The disinterment is going like hell. Confederates yelled at Tami Sawyer. They damaged a Black Lives Matter display. A righteous man burned a Confederate flag and now the spokesperson for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Lee Millar, is begging people to just stay away. He told WREG: “We don’t want anyone to come down. We don’t want anything stirred up. Just leave things alone and don’t come bother the construction workers or anybody else in the park.”

The most curious thing to me about the Forrest removal is that the Forrests still have their plot in the Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. That’s right. When Forrest died, he was placed in a cemetery, like a regular person. It was only in the early 1900s that Forrest was dug up the first time and moved to a park named in his honor. People have written whole books about the ways Confederate monuments sprang up in periods in our country when Black people were making real gains, so I won’t rehash that here. Suffice to say that, much like how the Confederate flag started appearing on state flags in the South in the 1950s — during school desegregation — it’s not surprising that a Confederate general would be dug up and redisplayed in 1904.

But the Forrests could go back to Elmwood. The Sons of Confederate Veterans could just put them back where they found them. Instead, the Forrests are being moved to National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs in Columbia, Tenn.

Did you even know we had a National Confederate Museum in Columbia? Me neither. But they have a website. It is hilarious. Maybe they should have been up recruiting from the young racists marching in Nashville this weekend to get some basic social media help. They have a blog, but there’s no blogging taking place. Their page about the plantation that houses the museum contains one whole bit of lorem ipsum, where they’ve just not bothered to put any real content. I assume this is where the Nathan Bedford Forrest stuff will go.

Why here though? Forrest’s family is all buried either in Mississippi, where his family lived when he was growing up, or Elmwood, where Forrest had been. If they wanted to move him closer to his birthplace, well, there’s literally the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home in Chapel Hill, Tenn.