After the War Memorials to Forrest Went Up While Ft. Pillow Victims Were Ignored

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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The victims of the Fort Pillow Massacre were honored last month as part of an effort to rescue the memory of African Americans in the Civil War and Reconstruction. From the article covering the ceremony:

It’s a chapter that is often missing from the history books.

On April 12, 1864, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest led his troops in overtaking the Union garrison of around 600 men at Fort Pillow and slaughtering them after they had surrendered.

The killings, as described by historian Andrew Ward in his book, “River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War,” were so horrific that the blood from the bodies tainted the Mississippi River red.

Half of those whose blood colored the river were African-American – and their deaths have been all but forgotten in the rush to build monuments and name parks after Forrest, who later founded the Ku Klux Klan, or to sanitize the atrocities through marginalizing the victims.

Which is precisely what the ceremony – the second to be held – was designed to counteract.

“We wanted to make sure that more African-Americans knew about Fort Pillow, and what can we do to rectify the discrepancies and the one-sidedness of the history,” Christian said, “because one of the things that we knew is that those who were vanquished, the losers, were able to write the history of the South.

“They were also the ones, at the turn of the century, who were able to put all the monuments up. But while we will not necessarily take those markers down, it is important that we intersect those markers with what more accurately reflects that history.”



http://www.commercialappeal.com/sto...african-american-ft-pillow-victims/100281168/
 
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