Benjamin Israel told me that the street named after Nathan Bedford Forrest bothered him the most. He told the commissioners that, too. Sometimes the commissioners were supportive of his ideas. Sometimes he could feel their condescension. One told him that maybe they could just take an ‘r’ out of Forrest to make it Forest Street. “Why not stab me in the back and take the knife out just a little?” Israel asked him. Nathan Bedford Forrest sold thousands of black slaves out of a “Negro Mart” in downtown Memphis, often advertising that his merchandise came “directly from Congo.” A newspaper describes him whipping a slave stretched out between four men. Another time, Forrest whipped a naked woman with a “leather thong dipped in salt water.” At the start of the civil war, Forrest enlisted as a private; he ended the war as a general. One of his most notorious victories came at Fort Pillow, a Union garrison Forrest had decided to attack for supplies. The Union forces holding the fort included a large number of African-American soldiers. Some had been Forrest’s former slaves. Forrest and his three thousand men singled out the black troops for particularly vicious attacks, refusing to accept their offers of surrender.
“The slaughter was awful,” a Confederate sergeant wrote. “Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted arms scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.” One black soldier pleaded for his life to a Confederate soldier chasing him. “God damn you, you are fighting against your master,” the soldier said. The soldier then raised his gun and shot him. Forrest himself wrote that the river was dyed with blood for 200 yards. “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners. We still hold the fort.”
Unsurprisingly, losing the war didn’t change Forrest’s mind about black people, and he soon became the KKK’s first Grand Wizard. Forrest defended the Klan in Congress in 1871, arguing that black people were being “insolent” and ladies were being “ravished.” The KKK had simply been formed to “protect the weak.” As Michael Newton has described, a journalist stopped Forrest on his way out of the hearing: “with a wink, the Grand Wizard told him, ‘I lied like a gentleman.’” Black people’s post-civil war hopes, which had, as Newton explained, manifested themselves so energetically in new schools, self-improvement groups, and civic organisations, were soon crushed.
None of this history is remotely secret. None of this history is even much contested anymore. And it’s why, Israel told me, Forrest Street particularly bothered him. I had to agree. I couldn’t understand why anyone in modern America would want to commemorate him.