The Tennessean reports that Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest "had least one black supporter in Murfreesboro on Sunday." That would be African-American H.K. Edgerton, the famed "darling of the white-supremacist wing" of the Southern Heritage movement.
Edgerton was in Murfreesboro to take a stand against the MTSU student effort to remove the name of the confederate hero from the campus ROTC building. The MTSU Student Government Association "passed a resolution to rename Forrest Hall by a vote of 19 to 5."
Who was Nathan Bedford Forrest? According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:
"Forrest was a Memphis slave trader who acquired fabulous wealth before the war; He commanded the troops who carried out an 1864 massacre of mostly black prisoners; and He led violent resistance to Reconstruction as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan." And, "a Civil War newspaper account described whippings in which four slaves held the victim stretched out in the air while Forrest personally administered the bullwhip. Women were allegedly stripped naked and whipped with a leather thong dipped in salt water."
The MTSU campus building was named after the confederate hero during the Jim Crow era of the 1950s.
Obviously, African-Americans had other things on their minds at the time and so raised no objections to the names of buildings at white universities.
The Tennessean tells us that confederate champion H.K. Edgerton is a "former president of the Asheville, N.C., branch of the NAACP." The Gannett paper forgets to mention that Edgerton was suspended from the NAACP in 1998 and subsequently voted out of office.
In the opinion of H.K. Edgerton, "it was better to be an African in the Southland as a slave than to be free in Africa."
Little wonder that Rev. Skip Alston, executive director of the North Carolina NAACP, told a reporter: "His elevator doesn't go all the way to the top. It doesn't even reach the second floor. We don't recognize anything that he's doing."
The Tennessean also tells us that Edgerton was invited to come to Tennessee to take a stand on the controversy by Todd Gober, president of the local chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), is "a Southern heritage group that has been largely dominated by racial extremists since 2002," and has again recently "elected a commander in chief and other national leaders who are closely tied to its radical faction."
I know you didn't expect the Tennessean to tell you that.
Pictured here are H.K. Edgerton, Kirk Lyons and Neill Payne having a good laugh by placing napkins on their heads and posing as Klansmen.
For more info, see the MTSU Student Paper, Sidelines.
Race Racism Nathan Bedford Forrest Politics News MTSU H.K. Edgerton Red State Media The Tennessean Sons of Confederate Veterans Murfreesboro Tennessee
