NASHVILLE - Gov. Bill Lee announced Thursday he has named Dr. Logan C. Hampton, president of Lane College, to serve on Tennessee's State Capitol Commission, a 12-member panel that for years has resisted efforts to remove the bust of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Capitol.
In a statement, the Republican called Hampton, who is Black, "a thoughtful leader of a respected Tennessee institution and I am pleased to appoint him to the State Capitol Commission. I thank him for accepting this role and his willingness to serve his fellow Tennesseans."
Hampton has served since 2014 as president of Lane College, a historically Black Christian Methodist Episcopal Church-affiliated institution. He fills a West Tennessee vacancy on the panel and joins two other Black members on the State Capitol Commission. Another Black commissioner, Dr. Reavis L. Mitchell Jr., who served on the panel as chairman of the Tennessee Historical Commission, died earlier this month.
Lee's appointment of Hampton follows a tumultuous spring at the state Capitol during the legislative session that adjourned last Friday.
The annual fight over Forrest's bust at the Capitol picked up new intensity this year amid general demonstrations over racism and racial injustice in Tennessee and across the U.S. after the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who was Black, as a white police officer put his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes.
The Republican-controlled General Assembly again rebuffed efforts to remove the bust of Forrest, whose military tactics are still studied but who remains reviled by critics as a pre-Civil War slave trader whose troops massacred surrendering Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in West Tennessee, according to numerous accounts. After the war, Forrest became an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
State lawmakers this year did pass a bill eliminating a legal requirement that governors annually sign a proclamation declaring each July 13 as "Nathan Bedford Forrest Day." But an effort to eliminate the day of recognition - it once was a paid state holiday for state workers but that ended in 1968 - failed. Lee had sought to get out of signing the proclamation after his signing of it in 2019, which became national news.
Also failing was a bill that urged the State Capitol Commission to allow only busts and portraits of state or federal elected leaders in the Capitol, a move that could have given the panel incentive to remove the Forrest bust.
Another bill did pass allowing the Senate and House speakers each to appoint one person to the commission.
Other than the Legislature, the State Capitol Commission is one of two groups that have a say over what is done at the Capitol, the other being the Tennessee Historical Commission. In 2017, then-Gov. Bill Haslam's appointees requested the Capitol Commission move the Forrest bust to a museum. Commissioners voted 7-5 against it.
Contact Andy Sher at asher@timesfreepress.com or 615-255-0550. Follow on Twitter @AndySher1.
The Nathan Bedford Forrest displayed in the Tennessee State Capitol Thursday. (AP File Photo/Mark Humphrey)