SELMA, Ala. -- Council members in an
Alabama city voted Tuesday to stop a group's work on a new monument
honoring a Confederate general who was an early leader in the Ku Klux
Klan.
The Selma City Council voted 4-0 with
two members abstaining to stop all work on the monument to Gen. Nathan
Bedford Forrest until the courts decide whether the city or a
Confederate heritage group owns the cemetery property where the monument
would be rebuilt.
The vote came after a group of protesters marched to City Hall.
Demonstrations
by civil rights groups about 10 years ago led to the relocation of a
Forrest monument from outside a city building near downtown to a section
of a city cemetery honoring Confederate war dead. But Forrest's bust
was removed and apparently stolen from atop a 7-foot granite memorial
earlier this year, and efforts to rebuild it have drawn protests and
calls by civil rights activists not to replace it.
Detractors
say Forrest traded black people like cattle, massacred black Union
soldiers and joined the early Ku Klux Klan. His defenders dispute much
of that and counter with stories that depict him as a protector of slave
families and defender of the weak who resigned from the KKK.
A
member of the group Friends of Forrest, Pat Godwin, said she feels the
protests have been an effort to obscure the police investigation of the
disappearance of the bust.
"It's all smoke and mirrors to divert attention from the issue of the theft of the bust," Godwin said.
The
council had earlier indicated it would allow people to speak on the
issue at the Tuesday work session, but would not vote on the racially
sensitive issue. Council members changed their mind after activist Rose
Toure, a leader of the protests, and other speakers urged the council to
vote. Council member Bennie Ruth Crenshaw moved that the council order
all work on the monument stopped after city attorney Jimmy Nunn said he
had not been able to locate a deed to the Confederate section of the
cemetery.
"Let's stop the building and move this Nathan Bedford Forrest issue out of the way," Crenshaw said.
Another
council member, Susan Keith, abstained from the vote. She said earlier
she needed more information before she could decide how to vote. She
said she would also like to wait until the investigation of the theft is
completed.
"There's just too many discrepancies," she said.
The
marchers, chanting "No justice, no peace," had started at the Edmund
Pettus Bridge, where voting rights protestors were beaten by law
enforcement officers during a 1965 march, an episode that drew national
attention to violence against blacks in the South during the civil
rights era.
Several people told council
members that the city could move past those violent images by not
allowing the monument to be rebuilt.
"How are
we going to teach our kids anything if we give praise to this man?"
asked Selma resident Rosa Monroe, who said Forrest was not the kind of
man the city needs to be honoring.
Several
members of Friends of Forrest watched the march, but declined to
comment. No supporters of the monument spoke at the council work
session.
The supporters did hand out a press
release that described Forrest as a brave military leader who led
efforts to defend Selma from siege by Union forces late in the Civil
War.
Associated Press