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| Photo taken from Folio Weekly |
By Will Brown
The first time I saw the name Nathan Bedford Forrest I was a
freshman in college who was distracted from another project.
At the time, I was studying in a library in the center of a
campus that was once a plantation. The plantation owner was Florida’s first
territorial governor, William Duval. If you’ve heard that surname it’s probably
because there is a county in Northeast Florida named after him.
But, let’s stick with Forrest. Who was this guy whose name
has become national news 136 years after his death?
He was the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. It was social
organization for whites that was founded in Tennessee during Reconstruction.
After about two decades the organization became dormant. A similar whites-only
organization with the same name was created in the early years of the 20th
century with the hoodies, acts of American terrorism and mob mentality that
most of us associate with the Ku Klux Klan.
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| Nathan Bedford Forrest |
It
was announced Monday night a high school that was named after Forrest in
Jacksonville will be renamed in July 2014. The decision to switch the
school’s name to either West Side High or Firestone High has caused tension and
divisiveness at a school where 62 percent of the 1,327 students are black, 23
percent are white and 9 percent are Hispanic.
Was Forrest a great man? He had his faults like all of us. Considering
the decision to name a school after him in an area of the country history has
shown he did not visit nor influence was made by a school board that wanted to
send a one-finger salute to a government that demanded it integrate the back in
the 50s, it should not have been too incendiary to change the name in 2013.
“If you look at the history of the naming of Nathan B. Forrest High
School, the students originally wanted the school to be named Valhalla,” said Nikolai
Vitti, superintendent of Duval County Public Schools during Monday’s meeting. “Politics reigned and as a
response to desegregation and the civil rights movement, the school was named
Nathan B. Forrest. That was not the will of the students, and considering the
opinion of the students in this process, I think it is an opportunity to give
voice to students whose voices were not heard in the beginning and can
certainly be heard now."
Then again the school is located in a town that is named
after a general who was notorious for murdering and displacing American
Indians. It’s
a part of a school district that has schools named after educators, astronauts,
politicians and pre-Colonial explorer who tried to steal land from the Spanish.
Like a lot of locales, Florida history is complex and simple
at the same time. One of the easiest ways to understand it is to figure out the
who and what things are named after and why.
There are local governments named after Confederates in Brevard,
Pasco, Lee and Levy counties. There is a county in South Florida named after
the former governor who dredged the Everglades — Broward. There are counties
that are named after animals, fruit, conquistadors and, of course, Native
Americans.
There are more than 400 municipalities and thousands of
roads and buildings named after people, places and things, some of which, like
Forrest High, may no longer be politically correct.
Long before I read about the origins of most Florida
communities in Allen Morris’ 1995 book “Florida Place Names: Alachua to Zolfo
Springs” Nathan Bedford Forrest’s story captivated me because it was one that I
was not taught in high school.
It was probably too divisive and politically incorrect to
speak about a man with considerable warts. Then again, I went to high school in
a place where a NAACP
leader was bombed on Christmas day, a piece of history that I learned from
my father and aunt who are old enough to tell me the complete story of America’s
first civil rights martyr.
America is a country that wants warm and tingly feelings
with our information. We want our opinions to be validated by our peers. We
want to believe that what we are told is completely accurate, even if there is
much more context beneath the surface.
Nathan Bedford Forrest is yet another whose name has hit the
iceberg of political correctness and sunk. As satisfying as the renaming of
Forrest High may be, it’s yet another reminder that it’s easier to whitewash
uncomfortable history rather than to learn it, understand it and refuse to
repeat it.
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
