NASHVILLE – Efforts to remove a bust of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest from Tennessee’s state Capitol could take a major step this week when a panel with powers to initiate the removal process is scheduled to meet.
The State Capitol Commission posted a notice Friday saying it will convene this Friday. The notice came one day after Gov. Bill Haslam renewed his call to remove the image of Forrest, a Tennessee native considered a brilliant Confederate military strategist but whose past as a slave trader and early Ku Klux Klan leader make him controversial.
Efforts to remove the bust from an alcove between the state House and Senate chambers reignited this month following a deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va.
White supremacist groups marched through the University of Virginia’s campus to protest removal of a park’s statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A female counter-demonstrator was killed and nearly 20 others injured when a man police say is a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd.
Haslam first called for removing the Forrest bust in 2015, after an avowed white supremacist massacred nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. Haslam renewed the call following a protest at Tennessee’s Capitol by black and white demonstrators in the wake of the Charlottesville attack.