• 'KKK leader' vows mass rally over renaming of Confederate-themed parks

    After three Confederate-themed public parks in Memphis, Tenn., were renamed, a man claiming to be a top Ku Klux Klansman says the group is planning the "largest" protest rally the city "has ever seen." WMC's Jason Miles reports.

    By Jeff Black, Staff Writer, NBC News

    Published 5:45 p.m. ET: The renaming of three Confederate-themed parks in Memphis has spurred foes — including a purported Ku Klux Klan leader known as the “Exalted Cyclops” — to lash out against what they say are attempts to erase history. Others, however, maintain such symbols and monuments represent racism and have to go.

    The Memphis City Council, fearful of intervention by state legislators, voted late Tuesday to approve changing the name of Forrest Park to Health Sciences Park. Confederate Park became Memphis Park and and Jefferson Davis Park, named for the president of the Confederacy, was renamed Mississippi River Park.

    The vote was 9-0 – seven African-American council members and two white council members voted for the changes -- with three council members abstaining and one council member absent.

    Forrest Park for years has stirred up emotions. It contains the grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry leader who traded slaves before the war and went on to become the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the infamous hate group that carried out a merciless campaign of lynchings, church fires and other terror against African Americans as well as other immigrant groups.

    During the war, troops under Forrest's command notoriously were accused of slaughtering Federal black troops after the Battle of Fort Pillow. The "Fort Pillow Massacre" became a rallying cry for the Union, according to historians.

    “The parks are changed. It's done," Councilman Lee Harris, told The Commercial Appeal. "We removed controversial names and named them something that is less controversial."

    Harris told Reuters, “We are becoming a city that is inclusive and respectful … Those names were dividing rather than uniting."

    Adrian Sainz / AP photo

    Formerly known as Confederate Park in downtown Memphis, Tenn., this downtown park will now be called Memphis Park. Two other Confederate-themed parks were also renamed by the Memphis City Council.

    Memphis is just over 63 percent African-American, according to 2010 U.S. Census figures.

    The honoring of Confederate heroes and emblems — such as the flying of the Confederate flag — has been a divisive issue in the South for years, so the Memphis vote surely doesn’t end the debate.

    “They’re trying to get rid of history. They’re trying to rewrite it,” Katherine Blalock told the Appeal after the vote.

    And in an interview with WMC-TV, a man calling himself a KKK leader known as the “Exalted Cyclops” -- he refused to reveal his true identify and said to call him “Edward” -- said he was calling all fellow klansmen to join him in the “largest rally Memphis, Tennessee had ever seen.” He said they would rally in the former Forrest Park.

    "It's not going to be 20 or 30," Edward said. "It's going to be thousands of klansmen from the whole United States coming to Memphis, Tennessee."

    According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors the Klan, all four of the known Klan groups in Tennessee are small and fairly disorganized. So, it was unclear if such a large rally was even possible. 

    Still, the city’s top administrator, George Little, said that critics, including the KKK, were free to protest.

    "Should they do so and gather lawfully, then we wouldn't get any more involved with that than we would with any other group," Little said.

    The move by the Memphis council was meant to counter efforts in the Tennessee legislature to preserve Confederacy-related names.

    One of the sponsors of a bill that would ban renaming of historical parks and monuments in the state told The Commercial Appeal that he would not seek to retroactively have the names of the three parks in Memphis restored but would seek to preserve Confederate history elsewhere.

    “We’ve got monuments on the Capitol grounds that I wouldn’t have approved of putting there but they are there and they are part of our history, State Rep. Steve McDaniel said. “Changing names or removing monuments could have the appearance of trying to re-write history.”

    NBCNews.com’s M. Alex Johnson and Reuters contributed to this report

  • Waiting in the driveway on MLK Day: Ads for KKK

    More than 30 flyers like this one were left in driveways at a Georgia subdivision on Martin Luther King Day.

    By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

    Dozens of people in a Georgia subdivision had something unusual in the driveway where the daily paper might be -- invitations to join the Ku Klux Klan.


    Sheriff’s officials in Newton County, outside Atlanta, picked up more than 30 KKK recruitment fliers on Monday, said Jeff Alexander, a sheriff’s investigator and spokesman. Monday was the national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

    Authorities collected four versions of the flier, all of them depicting a Klansman in a hooded robe. “Help Save Our Race,” one reads.

    A local newspaper, The Rockdale Citizen, reported that the fliers were left in plastic sandwich bags and weighed down by rocks.

    Alexander told NBC News that the fliers appeared to be from a group in North Carolina, and that there was no known active KKK division in Newton County.

    A call to the phone number on the flier from NBC News was not immediately returned.

    Alexander described the subdivision as racially diverse and similar to others in the county.

    He said sheriff’s officials had determined that there was no threat in the fliers and that no laws had been broken.

    “We collected the fliers,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they won’t be distributed again.”

    Local news reports in recent months have said that similar fliers turned up in neighborhoods in Virginia and Tennessee, and Alexander said there were reports of other fliers being left in neighborhoods along the East Coast on Monday.

    Similar flyers have turned up in other states in recent months as well, local reports said.

  • Monument to Civil War general, Ku Klux Klan leader triggers controversy

    Montgomery Advertiser via The Associated Press/file

    A monument honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest in Selma, Ala., in 2011.

    By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The renovation of a monument honoring a Civil War Confederate general, who was the first "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, is once more creating controversy in Selma, Ala., 11 years after protesters got it moved off of public property.

    The memorial is being repaired after the bust of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was stolen in March from the 7-foot-tall granite monument it rested upon at a cemetery in Selma, reported The Birmingham News. A group known as the Friends of Forrest are replacing it, according to local media; and the United Daughters of the Confederacy are adding a pedestal and fencing to make it harder to steal, Selma City Council President Dr. Cecil Williamson told NBC News.

    "I would recommend this man (Forrest) for any young people to model his life after," Todd Kiscaden, of Friends of Forrest, told local NBC affiliate WSFA 12 News. "The man always led from the front. He did what he said he was going to do. He took care of his people, and his people included both races."

    Not everyone remembers the general that way.

    Though Forrest was one of the Confederacy’s better generals and their best cavalry leader, he was an “extreme racist,” Mark Pitcavage, an expert of military history and right-wing extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, told NBC News.

    Renovations on an Alabama monument honoring the Ku Klux Klan's founder has sparked outrage from critics who are pushing to stop the expansion. WSFA's Samuel King reports.

    Men under his command killed “in cold blood” 250 black soldiers fighting for the Union who were captured at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, Pitcavage said. “No one has ever proven conclusively that Forrest himself ordered it, but at the very least this was the sort of thing he was letting his men do,” he added. A federal congressional committee investigating the April 12, 1864, killings received testimony that as many as 200 black soldiers were slain after they surrendered at Fort Pillow.


    "Here's a man who killed African-Americans who had surrendered, who were not a threat to anybody," Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, told WSFA. “And yet we are talking about a monument to him.”

    Forrest, a slave owner and a slave trader, was tapped to be the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard – or supreme leader, the KKK’s highest position -- at a meeting in April 1867, according to Pitcavage and the Anti-Defamation League.

    “Although he was the titular head of the entire Ku Klux Klan, in practice he didn’t have much influence beyond Tennessee. It’s not like the Internet was there and he could give guidance to all of his followers across the country,” Pitcavage said.

    The Klan was “unbelievably violent,” killing many people and burning down schools and churches, leading Forrest to disband it in 1868 because the Grant administration decided to send federal troops to the South to maintain public order, Pitcavage said.

    “All he (Forrest) did was issue a formal order for appearance's sake, knowing that the Klan was not going to disappear and the Klan did not disappear. It continued full force for a number of years, but he was no longer officially its head after that point,” he said.

    'A public outcry' when statue first went up
    The first monument to Forrest was put up on city property in October 2000 under the permission of the local government administration in power at the time. People dumped trashed on it and held a mock lynching, tying rope around it in protest, Williamson said. With a new mayor in office and “such a public outcry from parts of the community about it being on public property,” the city council voted to move it in 2001, he added.

    The new site is on an acre of land donated to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1877, said Williamson, adding that he believed the group was in control of the lot. NBC News’ efforts to reach the group for comment were not successful.

    “Once it was moved it had just basically been sitting out there for the past 11 years undisturbed until the bust was stolen,” Williamson said. “It was like most people in town did not know or did not care that it was even out in the cemetery.”

    But, Malika Sanders-Fortier, who described herself as a community leader in Selma, has started a petition calling for the city council to remove the monument.

    "Monuments celebrating violent racism and intolerance have no place in this country, let alone in a city like Selma, where the families of those attacked by the Klan still live," she wrote in her petition, which had collected more than 15,000 signatures as of Wednesday.

    But Williamson said it wasn't a city matter, noting the monument didn't belong to the local government, and that, as far as he knew, it was not on city property.

     

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