MEMPHIS — Charlene Harmon and her fiancé, Victor Bryant, walked Thursday through a small park overlooking the Mississippi River, pleased by the view — and what it did not include.
“I feel a sense of relief,” said Ms. Harmon, 63, a retired nurse. “Finally, we can come down and really enjoy this park. And we don’t have to see something that reminds us of our painful past: the lynchings, and beatings, and the selling of our forefathers.”
A towering monument to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was removed from Memphis Park on Wednesday night, along with an*even bigger equestrian statue*of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, from a second park. Convinced the statues needed to come down, city leaders circumvented a state law preventing their removal by selling the parkland to a nonprofit group — a creative solution that Republican leaders of the Tennessee House branded as potentially illegal.
Likes: 
Reply With Quote
