Well then I wasn’t talking about you and your friends. I was talking about those other guys.
There’s glory for you.
“Letter evidence”? That’s a good one. Speaks a lot more strongly than all the bodies, and testimony that Forrest hated and had executed blacks working with the Union.
Obviously that negates their trying to surrender. They should have eaten those rifles, so as not to be caught with “their arms with them”.
His modern idolization in the South (and that of the Confederacy in general) seems to coincide remarkably with the rise of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and early '60s. It was in 1959 that the new high school in Jacksonville, Fla. was named after him at the urging of the Daughters of the Confederacy (this was also the period when Confederate flags started flying above state capitols in the South). And if no one cares about his “idolization” now, it’s odd that the Jacksonville school board voted just a couple of years ago to keep his name on the school.
No doubt that after this little legacy-building exercise he spent his last days preaching against the Jim Crow laws.
(crickets)
The only thing you left out was that he loved his dogs.
The revisionism doesn’t wash. All it does it highlight the residue of diehard Lost Cause sentiment and gives people the wrong idea about the South as a whole.
Well, I don’t care who you are, that was a fine speech.
Nearly all types of crimes are more prevalent in the South.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/sh20031119ar01p1.htm
Further: DEATH BY MURDER
Murder of officers of the law is also higher in the south than in other regions of the country as well.
As to the issue of racism, I have to encourage our Southern friends here to realize that trying to find ways to mitigate the impact of the KKK on the impression of Southern racism is a real non-starter. It’s a little like pointing positively to Josef Mengele’s advancements in the study of twin physiology.
It does actually, being a contemporary account of the episode, rather than prepared testimony years later.
Doesn’t exactly square with your characterization of them as “prisoners” does it?
Utter bullshit. What “modern idolization” are you talking about? He had things named for him all along. The fact that you found one from 1959 has no particular significance. I’m sure you could find similar namings from 1949, and 1939, and 1929. And are you suggesting the UDC was some kind of hate group? Really? Wow.
They should have probably changed it to satisfy the butthurt.
You mean the ones passed in the 1890s, more than a decade after his death? That would have been a neat trick!
Who keeps bringing up Forrest? Who mentioned Forrest in this thread? It wasn’t a Southerner. So who keeps stirring the shit? Let it rest.
Oh, and this:
Cite?
I don’t think I’d go so far as to call the UDC a hate group, but I do get an “Oh, how they died in a noble cause, and isn’t it a shame we lost the war” vibe from them. And the organization was pretty strong in fighting against civil rights in the 1950s.
Before the outraged cries of “Godwin!” start, I’ll mention I was thinking of an analogy with another accomplished soldier, Erwin Rommel.
Here’s another guy who was accomplished on the battlefield, only without the baggage of war atrocities, prior slave trading or leadership in a violent turn-back-the-clock movement after the war. He actually opposed the evil of his leadership at a time when it was dangerous to do so (and it cost him his life). Yet I don’t think there’s any Erwin Rommel High School in Germany.
They realize the value of not trying to sugar-coat and cling to the past.
The first of these was passed in 1876 while Forrest was still alive. And that doesn’t include the Black Codes that were enacted after the Civil War.
“The black codes enacted immediately after the American Civil War, though varying from state to state, were all intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labor and all continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves.”
Somehow I haven’t heard of Forrest working to get such laws repealed either.
You keep trying to rehabilitate him.
Interestingly, the same New York Times which you cite regarding Forrest’s “friendly speech” had this to say upon his death:
“It is in connection with one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded massacres that ever disgraced civilized warfare that his name will for ever be inseparably associated. “Fort Pillow Forrest” was the title which the deed conferred upon him, and by this he will be remembered by the present generation, and by it he will pass into history…Since the war, Forrest has lived at Memphis, and his principal occupation seems to have been to try and explain away the Fort Pillow affair. He wrote several letters about it, which were published, and always had something to say about it in any public speech he delivered. He seemed as if he were trying always to rub away the blood stains which marked him.”
The Wikipedia article also has interesting things to say about Forrest’s association with the Klan.
“Author Andrew Ward, however, writes, “In the spring of 1867, Forrest and his dragons launched a campaign of midnight parades; ‘ghost’ masquerades; and ‘whipping’ and even ‘killing Negro voters.”
Yup, the man just abnorred violence.
More good stuff in the link about the various monuments and tributes to Forrest in the South that the “butthurt” Lost Causers just can’t seem to relinquish.
Try reading the SPLC link again.
And again, the hotbed of the Klan these days is the Rust Belt.
So who is trying to do that?
I didn’t raise the topic.
And I am not “trying to rehabilitate him.” Just challenging factually incorrect statements about him. We are here to fight ignorance, you know.
We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks
We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.
We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks …
Laugh or get pissed as the mood may strike you, but at least one rather biased commentator insists the problem with the South and most of the West and Midwest is directly traceable to patterns of settlement by those god-bothering, whoopass-obsessed Scots-Irish.
Kudzu.
Like “sweet tea”, another invasive menace from the South.
:eek: I didn’t know that!
One of these is not like the other.
This, to the South’s credit, appears to be a more coastal/interior divide than anything else. Even there, though, the South stands out.
No one makes a particularly good showing here… but it’s clear the South is far more f’ed up than anywhere else.
Interesting stats, at least
The South has great food. That makes up for alot 
Zebra mussels.
No, there is nothing “wrong” with the South. It’s superior in many ways to other parts of the US. Our culture has been enthusiastically imported by every corner of the country, and the world. We have given you music and art that changed the face of the planet. Southern artists, or artists that want to be Southern, are the most legendary of modern times. Every other part of the country, while decrying everything about the South, has, to one extent or another, co-opted Southern culture and claimed it for their own.
That art sometimes comes from the troubled past of the South, and that’s what makes it interesting, of course.
The food is excellent, and has more variation across the region than almost any other place. Tidewater cuisine to soul food to New Orleans to East Texas barbecue. Our food is as good as it gets.
Our natural environment is the most biodiverse, well-preserved, and interesting in the country. We have old landscapes that date back half a billion years. We have a dynamic, high-energy ecosystem which, combined with the extraordinary geographical variation in the region, and the fact that it has not undergone glaciation or recent sea-level rise, supports an enormous variety of species both widespread and endemic. Further, we are one of only a few places on the planet where the average temperature has NOT increased due to Global Warming. This is most likely due to the fact that most people in the South now live in cities of varying size, and the rural regions are sparsely populated and heavily forested. By comparison, the young landscapes of the West and North are dull and uninteresting (not to mention badly depleted). We are still finding intact endemic communities and new species down here. I personally know one biologist who moved to Alabama from New York simply because there’s so very much to study here.
I live in a cosmopolitan Southern city that hosts one of the finest medical schools in the world. My department has faculty that have done groundbreaking ecological work in Antarctica, and have Antarctic geographical features named after them. I live in an old neighborhood that is probably a 50:50 mix of white and black. I’ve lived this way my entire life. I never went to a school, in fact, that wasn’t at least 50% black. I’m perfectly aware of Southern history, but that stuff is going away, and probably faster than other regions of the country. Yeah, there are ghettos. Yeah, there is white flight. Those things are a product of being American, not Southern.
And our girls are a hell of a lot prettier. 
Keep your California girls. I’ll take a Southern Belle or two, please.