Staff Photo by Ashlee Culverhouse/Chattanooga Times Free Press - June 22, 2012.
David CookIn light of the racism and violence in Charleston, S.C., Nashville politicians are considering the removal of the 4-foot tall, state Capitol bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who later became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
It's staggering the Forrest bust has remained this long, as if somehow our elected leaders have been content to govern near the statue gaze of a Klan leader. Historians say he was brutal in battle; they also say, later in life, Forrest was repentant and renounced his Klan participation.
But Forrest isn't busted in the Capitol for whatever moral enlightenment he found, but because he represents the continued whisper of allegiance toward old Dixie-esque ways.
House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga, has proposed replacing Forrest's bust with that of native son Davy Crockett. Historically, it's a fine idea. Morally, it's lukewarm.
If we are to make amends for years of Forrest's wizardry gaze over the Capitol, we must swing the pendulum harder toward righteousness and clear-eyed racial justice. Crockett can't get us there.
I suggest Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Wells was the best of Tennessee. She was a moral giant, our early version of Rosa Parks, who fought against the very thing Klansmen encouraged: lynching.
She was also black.
And a woman.
And it's high time radical black women in Tennessee are rewarded with as much political memory as dead Confederate generals.
In 1862, Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi. Freed through the Emancipation Proclamation, she soon moved to Memphis, where, in her early 20s, she became a schoolteacher.
It was in Memphis that her conscience exploded into the righteous activism by which her life would be known. In 1884, Wells had bought a first-class train ticket, but was ordered by the conductor to leave her seat and move into the Jim Crow section.
In an act of civil disobedience that predates Rosa Parks by some 70 years, Wells said no. (They threw her off the train. She sued. And won in court, then lost in appeals.)
She soon became editor of a Memphis paper - "The Free Speech and the Headlight"- that advocated for racial justice. When her friends were lynched, Wells then found the diamond-courage to begin a journalistic career that exposed lynching. In Memphis, she helped organize boycotts of white business. Her life was threatened, her newspaper offices were destroyed.
She left Memphis for Chicago, where she continued her anti-lynching campaign by writing "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "The Red Record," which documented lynchings and investigated the faux claims white authorities made as to why black men deserved to be hanged.
In the early 20th century, Wells fought for suffrage rights. She marched with Alice Paul, or at least tried to. She protested in Washington. She worked alongside Frederick Douglass to boycott Chicago's 1893 World Fair for its exclusion of blacks. She helped create the NAACP and National Association of Colored Women. With Jane Addams, she fought segregation in Chicago schools. Ran for public office.
When she married, Wells kept her own name, alongside her husband's.
"Brave woman!" Frederick Douglass wrote. "You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured."
Hers was a service far, far greater and more righteous than Forrest's ever could be.
***
What would you say to the folks at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston?
"We are grieving with them," said Franklin McCallie. "We are reaching out to them. We support them. We marvel at their compassion."
McCallie and members of the interracial Chattanoogans Connected have partnered with the City of Chattanooga and Main Street Innovations to host a card-writing campaign from Chattanooga to Charleston in honor of the nine black Christians shot to death last week.
Last night, they held a rally, vigil and candlelit public gathering. But the card campaign? It was an idea that began most beautifully.
With 10-year-old Mason Lowe.
"We were talking about it at the house," said his mom, Donna. "We're an interracial family - we've been married 20 years - so we talk about these things."
With his parents, Mason brainstormed a few ideas before stumbling on the card-writing campaign.
"This is one proud moment for a mom," said Donna.
Through Wednesday, July 1, at 5:30 p.m., any Chattanoogan can drop off a card at the lobby of City Hall. They'll be delivered to the Emanuel AME congregation soon after.
"It's time for white people to stand up," said McCallie. "As a 75-year-old white male Southerner, I'm grieving. But I also want to speak about the problems we're facing and will continue to face that so many whites aren't willing to recognize."
Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCook TFP.