Meeting explores complex legacy
Calls for removal of statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest attracts crowd
For just over two hours Friday, a 112-year-old stone figure sparked a dialogue that raised points about the value of history, the meaning of symbols and the quest for racial equality in Rome and
Floyd County.
Around 100 people attended a special called meeting of the Rome Community Development Committee set aside to exclusively discuss the passionate opinions swirling around the statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest that stands at the foot of Myrtle Hill Cemetery.
After hearing from several members of the public for nearly two hours, committee chair and city commissioner Mark Cochran told the crowd that he is asking the committee to explore the truth surrounding Forrest’s life — possibly resulting in the placement of signage at the site of the statue to provide historical context — and to look into the creation of permanent monuments to properly recognize Rome’s civil rights leaders.
Under Georgia law, the city cannot take any action to remove the monument except to relocate it to a site of equal prominence or visibility.
“A memorial is more than stone. It speaks to generations. It speaks to the deepest parts of our soul,” Cochran said. “And we cannot formally recognize or move forward without recognizing where we’ve been and where we want to go.”
While city commissioners spoke and invited black community leaders to speak on the nature of the recent movements against racial inequality and injustice, 25 members of the public, both Rome residents and nonresidents, spoke mostly on the divisive attitudes surrounding the statue of Forrest and the man himself.
Evil that men do ...
As protests and demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice have exploded across the country in the last two weeks, attention on the controversy around statues of Confederate heroes has led to the call for their removal from public spaces across the south.
Rome’s Abby Sklar began a petition on Change.org on Sunday calling for the removal of the statue of Forrest, causing a conversation to begin on social media. She addressed the city commission at its meeting Monday, and Friday’s meeting was set up to talk about the statue.
Sklar’s petition had over 4,800 signatures by Friday evening and she was one of the people who spoke about the possible motives behind the creation and placement of the statue.
The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy sponsored the statue of Forrest and it was erected in the middle of Broad Street in 1908 before being moved to what is now Veterans Plaza at the base of Myrtle Hill Cemetery near the entrance to South Rome, which includes a predominantly black neighborhood.
As a general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, Forrest was praised as a hero by Romans at the time for saving the town when he thwarted Union Col. Abel Straight’s goal of a mounted raid across North Georgia in 1863.
Later reports of his involvement in the massacre of approximately 300 black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in Tennessee painted a much darker picture of the man that he never shook off despite several attempts during the rest of his life.
On top of that he was an early member of the Ku Klux Klan and chosen as the group’s grand wizard.
“Without some kind of outside intervention, us white folks who grew up in Rome might have no way of knowing the significance of this statue to our black neighbors who don’t have the luxury of not knowing this history,” Rome native and resident Bobby Jones said.
He said the markings on the base of the monument make no mention of Forrest’s affiliation with the KKK or the rebirth of the KKK and Floyd County’s history of lynchings during the period of the monument’s creation.
“We don’t know these things because we avoided these difficult conversations. We’ve avoided addressing the painful and traumatic legacy of racial terror in this county. And that’s how we have a room full of people who see two different things when they look at a statue,” Jones said.
The good oft interred ...
Barry Colbaugh was the first person to speak during the public forum Friday. A resident of Gainesville, Colbaugh has family that lived and are buried in Rome. He started a Change.org petition to protect the statue and called Forrest a hero.
His petition had more than 5,000 signatures by Friday evening.
“The history of Rome and Floyd County is really tied a lot to Forrest because the people cared about him and his character and who he was,” Colbaugh said.
Other speakers called for Romans to see Forrest as he lived later in his life, when he called for the first incarnation of the KKK to be dissolved and denounced his involvement in it after a series of activities by members he saw as unruly.
He also publicly spoke of harmony between black and white Americans in 1875 during a meeting of the Independent Order of PoleBearers Association, a postwar organization of black southerners.
Rome businessmen Nathan Roberts mentioned Forrest’s advocacy for civil rights of freemen in post-war Tennessee and employment of former slaves as president of the Marion & Memphis Railroad as managers as well as laborers.
“I do think history is dynamic, and because it is dynamic we have an opportunity here to change this. We need to see Forrest as he left this earth and not everything he did before,” Roberts said.
Rome resident Jesse Burnette followed Roberts.
“What he says is correct. If we can’t see his humanity, you’re not going to see the humanity in anyone else. But the fact is, the legacy he left is not the one of redemption. The harm that he caused in the war and in his time with the Ku Klux Klan is the legacy that he has left,” Burnette said.
The road from here
Burnette and Jones both urged the city to seek the Equal Justice Initiative, whose Community Remembrance Project works to memorialize a community’s documented victims of racial violence.
There were also calls for the city to become involved in efforts to erect plaques and monuments recognizing members of the community who fought for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
“What we have to remember is history is his story. It’s not always completely accurate because it always ends up being someone’s version of what happened,” city commissioner Bonny Askew said. “We don’t see all sides of it. But what we have to do is look a little bit deeper and see what the real truth is, and in doing so begin to see the other side of the issue.”
Rome resident Jesse Burnette speaks Friday about the statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. “What he says is correct. If we can’t see his humanity, you’re not going to see the humanity in anyone else. But the fact is, the legacy he left is not the one of redemption. The harm that he caused in the war and in his time with the Ku Klux Klan is the legacy that he has left,” Burnette said.