Principal’s conviction spurs review
The state-run Achievement School District is reviewing hiring policies and procedures for its charter school operators after discovering a Memphis interim principal has a federal felony conviction.
The principal, Koai Matthews of Lester Prep in Binghamton was hired legally, and the Capstone Education Group said he was forthcoming about his past, which involved no violence, drugs or sexual misconduct.
But the ASD was not made aware of the flag on Matthews background check, and both ASD leaders and Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said the district should have known.
ASD Superintendent Malika Anderson said the district will ask every charter in the next few weeks to notify the ASD if any employees had flags on their background checks, and what processes were used to determine that employee
The killings, as described by historian Andrew Ward in his book, “River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War,” were so horrific that the blood from the bodies tainted the Mississippi River red.
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.
“We wanted to make sure that more African-Americans knew about Fort Pillow, and what can we do to rectify the discrepancies and the one-sidedness of the history,” Christian said, “because one of the things that we knew is that those who were vanquished, the losers, were able to write the history of the South.
“They were also the ones, at the turn of the century, who were able to put all the monuments up. But while we will not necessarily take those markers down, it is important that we intersect those markers with what more accurately reflects that history.”
Some of this is already in the works. Herd has plans to meet with the West Tennessee Historical Society about signage and markers for Fort Pillow veterans, as well as other things. Yet there will be challenges. One will be to force those who still prefer to see Forrest and other Confederate generals and statesmen as men of their times and not men who were part of a system that went to war to maintain a system that viewed black people as subhuman, to face up to the atrocity that was Fort Pillow.
To exalt the African-Americans who were killed there to a place of honor would require such an admission – and such an admission would imply that Forrest, a Confederate hero to many in these parts, was actually a war criminal.
Nonetheless, it is important for that discussion to happen. Because the African-Americans who were killed at Fort Pillow weren’t just “some Negroes,” but a part of the American story.
And the part that is still struggling to be told.