A Tennessee Republican Wants to Remove a Statue of a Former KKK Grand Wizard and Replace It With One of Dolly Parton

In a debate over who ought to be memorialized at the Tennessee
state capitol, Dolly Parton has an unexpected champion on her
side.

Representative Jeremy Faison, a Republican from Tennessee’s 11th
District, is asking why the country singer and songwriter—born in
1946 in Pittman Center, Tennessee—shouldn’t be memorialized instead
of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first
Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Faison’s call follows several years of heated and sometimes deadly debate over the
fate of Confederate monuments on public grounds. Forrest led
Confederate troops in the Fort Pillow Massacre, in which hundreds
of surrendered Union soldiers, mostly black, were slaughtered.
Faison has called for moving the Forrest sculpture to the state
museum.

“If we want to preserve history, then let’s tell it the right
way,” Faison said, according to the Tennessean. “Right now there are eight
alcoves [in the Capitol]. Seven are filled with white men. How
about getting a lady in there? My daughter is 16, and I would love
for her to come into the Capitol and see a lady up there. What’s
wrong with [suffragist] Anne Dallas Dudley getting in that alcove?
What’s wrong with someone like Dolly Parton being put in that
alcove?”

The statue of Forrest, who made his fortune as a slave trader,
was installed in 1978. Supporters have defended the statue, saying
that Forrest later advocated for civil rights.

Representative Faison has changed his tune about that statue
over the last two years. At one point he supported the
memorialization of Forrest, but was later challenged by
African-American fellow representative G.A. Hardaway to read the
man’s actual writings on race, according to the
Tennessean.

The Capitol houses monuments to two Tennessean Presidents:
Andrew Jackson (a slaveholder) and Andrew Johnson (the first
president to be impeached in the House of Representatives). Also
memorialized is Sam Davis, a Confederate soldier executed by Union
forces during the Civil War. A statue of Dolly Parton, whose
preferred nickname is “the Smoky Mountain Nightingale,” would
change the dynamic, to say the least.

The post A Tennessee Republican Wants to Remove a Statue of
a Former KKK Grand Wizard and Replace It With One of Dolly
Parton appeared first on artnet News.