What's in a Kname?
Ruh-ro! We would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids.
Down here at an unnamed college somewhere in the middle of TN, the SGA has stirred up a duststorm with a resolution to rename the military sciences building on campus, home of ROTC. The name of the building? Forrest Hall. As in Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate General, millionaire slavetrader, and first Grand Wizard of the KKK. This apparently explains why I've been getting so much racist spam on the university e-mail system. The kerfuffle has exploded into the local news, reminding locals of a bitter debate only a few years ago about Vandy's "Confederate Hall." Students on both sides are circulating petititons. A guest columnist in the Nashville Tennessean informed us that NBF was a wonderful man, that he didn't really massacre a garrison full of black POWs during the war, and that the 1870s Klan was a noble civic organization saving civilization from criminals and carpetbaggers. Yeesh. And Hitler was nice to dogs.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting with various muckety mucks in which the Chief Muckety asked for advice on handling the flap. Understandably--given the array of incompatible interests on the two sides--their instinct is to punt, to treat this as a "teachable moment" while avoiding taking any position whatsoever in hopes that the mess will just go away. How this can be a teachable moment when no one has an official position or knows exactly WHAT we ought to teach is a question no one asked. You can't blame them for not wanting to jump on a hand grenade. From an administartion standpoint, this issue is a guaranteed loser.
Lost amidst all the debate about whether NBF was a racist is the question of why the hall was given that name in the first place. Is it simply because he's a local hero and it's a military building? NBF's true history would seem to matter less than what he symbolized when the hall was named. So when was it named?
1954. I wonder if that's significant? What else happened that year?
posted by tenaciousmcd @ 11:55 AM
3 Comments:
So, the good folks at [state university in Tennessee] renamed the ROTC building after the founder of the Klan in the same year as the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. I'm sure that this is a coincidence.
I've had this same experience with the "teachable" moment phenomenon, which administrators seem to think means something like "airing of [unfounded] opinions by everyone." I've never understood how that is "teaching" at all.
Great post.
Awesome post, TMcD! Funny how so much "southern heritage" dates to the mid 1950s.
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