Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Howard Portnoy’

Memphis city council votes to dig up remains of Confederate Civil War general, wife


waving flagBy on July 9, 2015

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Statue, shmatue. The latest effort to expunge the odious insanememory of a man who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War doesn’t just end with his sculpted likeness. The city of Memphis wants the earthly remains of General Nathan Bedford Forrest exhumed and moved out of Dodge. His wife’s, too.

CBS affiliate WREG reports:

On Tuesday evening the Memphis City Council unanimously passed a resolution to remove … Forrest’s remains from under his statue in the Health Sciences Park on Union Avenue….

“It is no longer politically correct to glorify someone who was a slave trader, someone who was a racist on public property,” said City Council member Myron Lowery.Keys taken

The removal of the general’s statue is its own ball of wax. An ordinance proposing that the offensive likeness be removed will have to be read before the council three times before approval can be granted. From there the Tennessee Historic Commission will have to render a decision on the disposition of the monument, though there is no timeline for when such a decision will be made. The next time the commission is scheduled to meet is in October.

Lowery freely concedes that the urgency to get rid of the statue was spurred on by the recent shooting deaths of nine churchgoers in South Carolina by a white supremacist.

Not everyone in Memphis is on board with moving the statue or Forrest’s remains. Lee Millar, a spokesman for the group Sons of the Confederate Veterans, told reporters:

I think it’s disgusting that people use the shooting in Charleston and use those victims to forward their own agenda and join this anti Confederate hysteria that’s going on.

To attack something like that now I feel is just really misguided.Socialism alert

Katherine Blalock, whose great grandfather served under Forrest, concurred: “We need to have a coming together of people, not a divide and conquer,” she explained.

Regardless of what decision is made, City Councilman Edmund Ford, Jr. said there is a more crucial issue that must be resolved. He asked:

Even when all the flags have been taken down and when all the artifacts have been moved, what do we do next as a people?

Good question.

freedom combo 2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

New black hashtag, #WeWillShootBack, urges retaliation: What could go wrong? (Video)


waving flagBy on June 21, 2015

Credit: Stephen B. Morton/AP

Credit: Stephen B. Morton/AP

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has given way to a new, more proactive meme promising — to paraphrase a memorable line by Sean Connery’s character in “The Untouchables” — that for every one of ours they send to the morgue, we’ll send two of theirs. The hashtag — #WeWillShootBack — is reportedly intended as a coping mechanism for black Americans who feel under siege following the massacre in Charleston last week.

According to Mashable, Taurean Brown, the creator, explains that the age-old advice to Americans in trouble — call the police — is no longer an option for blacks. He is quoted as saying that police killings of unarmed minorities occur too often for conventional law enforcement to be trusted. Said Brown:

We’re often the first ones that are called upon to be nonviolent. I want to change the narrative to say that we have the right to defend ourselves, just like every human being.

The hashtag, which is borrowed from title of a recently published book by Georgia State University African studies professor Akinyele Umoja, has appeared in 25,000 tweets since Wednesday’s murders, including the following:

tweet01

War DrumsBrown is quick to point out that he isn’t advocating the random shooting of white people:

What I’m saying is we have a right to organize ourselves, and defend our humanity. We’re taking the power into our own hands, and not allowing another entity go do that for us.

One anticipates a negative reaction to this campaign from the left, which tends to be anti-gun. Addressing the Charleston massacre in particular, one representative of that camp, veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, said Friday on MSNBC:

I cannot imagine the horror that could’ve occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started and you had a full-scale gunfight. You might not even have three survivors.

A video of his remarks follows:

v01

Obviously, blacks have the same Second Amendment right to bear arms as all other Americans, but the still-anecdotal premise on which this meme is based — that blacks are being singled out by law enforcement and/or whites in general — should give everyone pause.

Civil Race Both freedom combo 2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud