On this day, 13 July 1921, the Tennessee state holiday Nathan Bedford Forrest Day was first observed, celebrating the 100th birthday of the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who was also a war criminal responsible for the murder of hundreds of mostly Black Union soldiers during the American civil war.
Confederate forces under Forrest's control carried out the Fort Pillow massacre of 1864, when they slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Union soldiers who had surrendered. They murdered most of the Black soldiers and roughly one third of the whites: burning some alive, crucifying others and hacking people to death.
One Confederate soldier described events in a letter to his family: "The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity."
After the war Forrest became the first national leader of the white supremacist terrorist group the Ku Klux Klan, helping lead a wave of terroristic violence, torture and murder against Black people and white Republican voters.
In June 2020, the Tennessee state government voted to continue to observe his birthday as a holiday, although under pressure from a national wave of Black-led anti-racist protests, they did amend the law slightly so that the governor does not have to personally sign a proclamation to him each year.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8483/tennessee-celebrates-kkk-leader
Photo by Brent Moore
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