The remains of Confederate general, slave trader and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest have been moved from Health Sciences Park along with those of his wife, the Sons of Confederate Veterans announced Friday, June 11, in the park.

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Plans were announced previously to move the remains to a Confederate-themed park in Columbia, Tennessee.

The remains of Forrest and his wife were found Monday, according to funeral director Brent Taylor, who oversaw the process. 

SCV leader Lee Millar said both sets of remains are at an undisclosed location pending reinterment at the museum in Columbia.

The joint announcement Friday with Memphis Greenspace, the private nonprofit that bought the park from the city and had an equestrian statue of Forrest removed in 2017, marks the end of Forrest’s physical presence in the city where he served as an alderman before the Civil War and prospered in the city’s slave trade before joining the Confederate cause.

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It also closes out an era in which Forrest’s legacy was lauded by 20th century city leaders who moved the remains of Forrest and his wife from Elmwood Cemetery to the base of the monument in the park they renamed in his honor.

The two reinterments in just over a century demonstrate the afterlife of Forrest’s legacy and how that legacy has changed as the city has changed.

Memphis Greenspace president and Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner said Forrest’s legacy remains volatile.

That volatility defined the park.

“There was never going to be peace here,” he said. “There were always going to be protests and rallies. We were always going to have issues here.”

The announcement of the finding of the remains, meanwhile, drew a small group of Turner, Taylor and Millar with several Greenspace board members and some of the attorneys who worked on the settlement and court cases.

Turner urged Memphians on all sides of Forrest’s controversial legacy to “let the park breathe” as work on removing other parts of the monument continues through the end of this month.

“This park is reflective of Memphis. It has everything Memphis has. It has the clash between the old and the new,” he said. “Everything that is Memphis is right here in this park. If we can get this park right, we can get this city right.”

Turner recalled a text message from Taylor Monday morning that at first prompted Turner to think something had gone wrong. Taylor didn’t say the remains had been found, instead telling Turner he had some news and ending with “God really is good.”

“We think General Forrest, of course, is a great Memphian. He’s done a lot for the city,” Millar said. “But a big active park like this is probably not the proper place for him.”

Taylor, a former City Council member and County Commissioner, said his role in finding and preserving the remains is “the most important role I’ve played.”

“Memphis is really a clash of two cultures. We’ve got two communities who really get along better in moving our city forward than many cities across the country,” he said.

“This issue has potential to tear us apart rather than bring us together,” Taylor said of his role between Memphians who have very different opinions about the monument and what should happen to Forrest’s remains.

He also noted that Forrest was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in the 19th century and was reinterred in the park in the 20th century and then reinterred again in the 21st century.

The Memphis City Council renamed the city’s three Confederate-themed parks in 2013, marking what few on the council realized at the time was the last in a series of efforts to remove the monuments that began in the 1960s.

Announcement on Forrest remains set for Friday in Health Sciences Park

The late Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who grew up in Memphis and attended LeMoyne Owen College, remembered fondly his attempts to as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to vandalize the statue. Barry said the efforts continued because of the reaction they got from Memphis Police of the time.

Former Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey tried several times to have the statues removed during his tenure on the commission across three decades. He was present the rainy night in 2017 when the statue was removed.

Fellow Commissioner Vasco Smith recalled talking down returning Vietnam veterans in the 1960s and early 1970s offering to blow up the statue with training they received in the war.

His wife, the late Memphis Branch NAACP Executive Secretary Maxine Smith planned protests at the park in the 1980s if then-Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter followed through on a plan to attend a gathering in the park organized by the University of Tennessee.

The university called off the gathering.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who was on the council at the time, said SCV leaders stopped the park renaming effort pre-2013 from moving further and removing the statues because of the political clout they had. They also had the backing of historians, many of whom were SCV members, who sat on the state and city formal historical boards.

Millar was chairman of the Shelby County Historical Commission at one time.

SCV, in 2011, went further by donating a group of cannons to Memphis Park, which was still named Confederate Park at that point. The group also had a 10-foot, ton-and-half concrete marker bearing the words “Forrest Park” installed at the edge of that park and claimed it had permission from the city.

Then-Memphis Mayor AC Wharton ordered it removed.

Then-City Council member Myron Lowery proposed changing the park names in 2013.

The renaming in Memphis prompted the Tennessee General Assembly to pass a law requiring a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission to remove Confederate monuments from public parks — even those owned by local governments.

Then-Memphis Mayor AC Wharton proposed in 2015 moving the Forrest statue and grave site, citing the massacre of nine Black parishioners at Emmanuel AME Church is Charleston by a white supremacist.

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Wharton’s successor as mayor in 2016, Jim Strickland, who was among the council majority voting to change the park names two years earlier, began the legal action for the removal of the monuments.

The process was slow-going, with the Tennessee Historical Commission repeatedly delaying hearings.

The court proceedings moved slowly as well, as a new activism emerged urging a more aggressive stance on the monuments.

A year before her 2018 election to the Shelby County Commission and three years after organizing the city’s first Black Lives Matter protest in the courtyard of the National Civil Rights Museum, Tami Sawyer agreed on the removal of the monuments.

But she was critical of Strickland for not acting more quickly, urging him to take down the monuments without court approval.

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Strickland said that would be breaking the law and that the city should remove the monuments legally.

Sawyer contended the protests she led pushed Strickland to remain committed to the removal. Strickland contended Sawyer was late to the effort and that his commitment never wavered.

With fears by the city that the General Assembly would close a loophole in the state law during the 2018 legislative session, Strickland coordinated the sale of the parks approved by the council by the end of 2017.

It was also ahead of citywide observances in 2018 of the 50th anniversary of the city’s historic sanitation worker’s strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Minutes after the council approval of the sale, Greenspace had workers — under heavy security — in both parks removing the statue of Forrest and a statue of Confederacy president Jefferson Davis as well as a bust of Confederate Capt. Harvey Mathes in Memphis Park.

The statues were taken to undisclosed locations as negotiations began with various groups wanting them.

Ultimately, Memphis Greenspace reached an agreement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans for the monument, with plans to relocate it and the remains of Forrest and his wife to the new Confederate museum in Columbia.

Court proceedings were required involving the descendants of Forrest to move the remains. Those proceedings were settled out of court last year and work began on dismantling the monument pedestal over the graves June 1.

The announcement Friday of the move of the remains out of the city comes one week ahead of a Juneteenth celebration in the park marking the freeing of slaves at the end of the Civil War.

Turner said the timing is a coincidence.

Eight months after the statues came down, Memphis Park was the site of the city’s first “Diner en Blanc”, biracial outdoor social event held at a location in the city that is a secret to the guests dressed in white until they are transported to the place.