Fort Pillow African-American victims honored
More than 150 years ago, some 40 miles north of Memphis, one of the greatest massacres of African-Americans in the nation unfolded.
But the way one sign at Fort Pillow tells it, they were just “some Negroes.”
It was one of many signs that members of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History saw while on a field trip to Fort Pillow some time ago, Clarence Christian, president of Memphis ASALH, said.
It, like many others, did more to glorify the Confederacy than tell gory truths.
“For example, one of the signs said that the Southern sharpshooters felled all of the Union leaders at Fort Pillow and some Negroes died,” Christian said, “when we know that the majority of those who died, who were massacred, were African-American … they were African-American colored troops and African-American family and folk who worked at Fort Pillow.”
So Wednesday, Christian, WeAllBe Inc. vice-president Callie Herd, and others gathered at Memphis National Cemetery to shred the shroud of anonymity from those African-Americans who were massacred at Fort Pillow and raise them to the recognition that they deserve.
They laid wreaths at the graves of 109 Fort Pillow veterans during a ceremony there — complete with a military color guard and a 21-gun salute. They also sang songs and heaped ancestral homages upon them and their African ancestors.
The ceremony — one of several events held over two days to honor those slaughtered at Fort Pillow and their descendants — reflected a grass-roots approach that Herd embraced to educate the community about the Fort Pillow massacre.
On April 12, 1864, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest led his troops in overtaking the Union garrison of around 600 men at Fort Pillow and slaughtering them after they had surrendered.
Half of those whose blood colored the river were African-American — and their deaths have been all but forgotten in the rush to build monuments and name parks after Forrest, who later founded the Ku Klux Klan, or to sanitize the atrocities through marginalizing the victims.
Which is precisely what the ceremony — the second to be held — was designed to counteract.