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Southern general's name may come off Fla. school
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| Contributor | The Sunset Provision |
| Last Edited | The Sunset Provision Oct 27, 2008 11:29pm |
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| Category | News |
| Media | Website - Yahoo News |
| News Date | Tuesday, October 28, 2008 05:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Nathan Bedford Forrest was a millionaire slave trader, a ruthless Confederate general, an early Ku Klux Klan leader — and the namesake of what is now a majority African-American high school.
After almost a two-year delay, the Duval County School Board next week will consider whether to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School to Firestone High, after the street it sits on. The board joins other Southern districts that have hotly debated whether to strip Confederate leaders' names from schools and other buildings.
The squabble is part of the modern South's never-ending soul searching over the Civil War and its legacy, a discussion that often finds Forrest at the center.
"This guy was a brutal monster," said Steven Stoll, an adjunct sociology instructor at Florida Community College who is white and supports changing the name of the high school. "Why would you want to keep honoring a person like this? It is an insult to black people."
Forrest is hardly the lone Confederate hero whose name adorns streets, buildings and other public projects, or used to.
But efforts to strip Confederates' names and take down memorials to them have mostly been thwarted throughout the South, often after being denounced as part of an effort to remove all references to the Confederacy. In Hampton, Va., for example, attempts to rename Robert E. Lee Elementary School and Jefferson Davis Middle School failed.
Some say Forrest's deeds have been exaggerated and have to be considered in the context of the Civil War.
"Forrest was revered all over the world and his tactics are still studied today," said Lee Millar, president of the General N.B. Forrest Historical Society in Memphis, Tenn. "He became a hero to all."
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