Posted on Jan 28, 2013
By Chris Hedges
On a windy afternoon a few days ago I went to a depressed
section of North Memphis to visit an old clapboard house that was once owned by
a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle. Oral history—and oral history is all
anyone has in this case since no written documents survive—holds that Burkle
used his house as a stop on the underground railroad for escaped slaves in the
decade before the Civil War. The house is now a small museum called
Slave Haven. It has
artifacts such as leg irons, iron collars and broadsheets advertising the sale
of men, women and children. In the gray floor of the porch there is a trapdoor
that leads to a long crawl space and a jagged hole in a brick cellar wall where
fugitives could have pushed themselves down into the basement. Escaped slaves
were purportedly guided by Burkle at night down a tunnel or trench toward the
nearby Mississippi River and turned over to sympathetic river traders who took
them north to Cairo, Ill., and on to freedom in Canada.
Burkle and his descendants had good reason to avoid written
records and to keep their activities secret. Memphis, on the eve of the Civil
War, was one of the biggest slave markets in the South. After the war the city
was an epicenter for Ku Klux Klan terror that included lynching, the nighttime
burning of black churches and schools and the killing of black leaders and
their white supporters, atrocities that continued into the 20th century. Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. If word had gotten out
that Burkle used his home to help slaves escape, the structure would almost
certainly have been burned and Burkle or his descendants, at the very least,
driven out of the city. The story of Burkle’s aid to slaves fleeing bondage
became public knowledge only a couple of decades ago.
The modest public profile of the Burkle house stands in
stunning contrast with the monument in the center of Memphis to native son
Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest, who is buried in Forrest Park under a statue
of himself in his Confederate general’s uniform and mounted on a horse, is one
of the most odious figures in American history. A moody, barely literate,
violent man—he was not averse to shooting his own troops if he deemed them to
be cowards—he became a millionaire before the war as a slave trader. As a
Confederate general he was noted for moronic aphorisms such as “War means
fighting and fighting means killing.” He was, even by the accounts of those who
served under him, a butcher. He led a
massacre
at Fort Pillow in Henning, Tenn., of some 300 black Union troops—who had
surrendered and put down their weapons—as well as women and children who had
sheltered in the fort. Forrest was, after the war, the first grand wizard of
the Ku Klux Klan. He used his skills as a former cavalry commander to lead
armed night raids to terrorize blacks.
Forrest, like many other white racists of the antebellum
South, is enjoying a disquieting renaissance. The Sons of Confederate Veterans
and the West Tennessee Historical Commission last summer put up a 1,000-pound
granite marker at the entrance to the park that read “Forrest Park.” The city,
saying the groups had not obtained a permit, removed it with a crane. A dispute
over the park name, now raging in the Memphis City Council, exposes the deep
divide in Memphis and throughout much of the South between those who laud the
Confederacy and those who detest it, a split that runs like a wide fault down
racial lines.
A call last week by Memphis City Councilwoman Janis
Fullilove, who is African-American, to strip Forrest’s name from the park and
rename it after the crusading black journalist Ida B. Wells set off such an
acrimonious debate between her and some white council members that Fullilove
left a meeting in tears.
Wells was one of the nation’s most courageous and important
journalists. She moved to Memphis as a young woman to live with her aunt. Her
investigations revealed that lynching was fundamentally a mechanism to rid
white businessmen of black competitors. When Thomas Moss of Memphis, a black
man who ran the People’s Grocery Co., was murdered with his partners by a mob
of whites and his store was looted and destroyed, Wells was incensed. “This is
what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” she wrote. She noted “that
the Southerner had never gotten over this resentment that the Negro was no
longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” and was using charges
of rape against black business owners to mask this resentment. The lynching of
Moss, she wrote, was “[a]n excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring
wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger
down.’ ”
Her newspaper, Free Speech, which railed against white mob
violence, the inadequate black schools, segregation, discrimination and a
corrupt legal system that denied justice to blacks, was destroyed by whites.
Wells was forced to flee the city, becoming, as she wrote, “an exile from home
for hinting at the truth.”
The split between those in Memphis who hold up authentic
heroes—those who fought to protect, defend and preserve life, such as Wells and
Burkle—and those who memorialize slave traders and bigots such as Forrest points
up a disturbing rise of a neo-Confederate ideology in the South. Honoring
figures like Forrest in Memphis while ignoring Wells would be like erecting a
statue to the Nazi death camp commander Amon Goeth in the Czech Republic town
of Svitavy, the birthplace of Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,200 Jews.
The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by
beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar
retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy
deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a
substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally
violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace
by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication
with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural
language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable
truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the
chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that
Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.”
Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t
begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with
the rise of the modern civil rights movement.
“Lord, have mercy,”
Fullilove
muttered as she listened.
But Forrest is only one of numerous flashpoints. Fliers
reading “Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Wants You to Join” appeared in
the mailboxes of white families in Memphis in early January. The Ku Klux Klan
also distributed pamphlets a few days ago
in
an Atlanta suburb. The Tennessee Legislature last year officially declared
July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day to honor his birthday. There are 32
historical markers honoring Forrest in Tennessee alone and several in other
Southern states. Montgomery, Ala., which I visited last fall, has a gigantic
Confederate flag on the outskirts of the city, planted there by the Sons of
Confederate Veterans. Confederate monuments dot Montgomery’s city center. There
are three Confederate state holidays in Alabama, including Martin Luther
King/Robert E. Lee Day. Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi also honor
Lee’s birthday. Jefferson Davis’ birthday is a state holiday in Alabama and
Florida. And re-enactments of Confederate victories in the Civil War crowd
Southern calendars.
The steady rise of ethnic nationalism over the past decade,
the replacing of history with mendacious and sanitized versions of lost glory,
is part of the moral decay that infects a dying culture. It is a frightening
attempt, by those who are desperate and trapped, to escape through invented
history their despair, impoverishment and hopelessness. It breeds intolerance
and eventually violence. Violence becomes in this perverted belief system a
cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost world. There are ample historical
records that disprove the myths espoused by the neo-Confederates, who insist
the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights and the protection of
traditional Christianity. But these records are useless in puncturing their
self-delusion, just as documentary evidence does nothing to blunt the
self-delusion of Holocaust deniers.
Those who retreat into fantasy cannot be
engaged in rational discussion, for fantasy is all that is left of their
tattered self-esteem. When their myths are attacked as untrue it triggers not a
discussion of facts and evidence but a ferocious emotional backlash. The
challenge of the myth threatens what is left of hope. And as the economy
unravels, as the future looks bleaker and bleaker, this terrifying myth gains
potency.
Achilles
V. Clark, a soldier with the 20th Tennessee Cavalry under Forrest during
the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow, wrote to his sister after the attack: “The
slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes
would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream
for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. … I, with
several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially
succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage
continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.”
