Built with mostly private funds and owned by the Friends of Forrest, the bust was set up on public property in October 2000 on a five-ton granite base in a majority Black neighborhood.

Two days after the monument was moved to the Unknown Confederate Soldiers section of the Old Live Oak Cemetery, the city of Selma hosted its annual commemoration of the 1965 Bloody Sunday voting rights march. Several thousand workers, farmers, and young people attended, including some who came from other states to be part of the weekend's events.

Two busloads of union members from Detroit, sponsored by the United Auto Workers union, were present and joined a several-day caravan to important sites from the civil rights era.

The annual event salutes the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march that helped lead to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act. On March 7, 1965, civil rights marchers set out for Montgomery some 50 miles away, but did not make it past the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the edge of downtown Selma. They were attacked with tear gas and nightsticks by state troopers and county lawmen on horseback. Many were left with fractured skulls and broken limbs.

Television images of this brutal attack on unarmed protesters demanding the right to register to vote were broadcast around the world, bringing home the reality of life under Jim Crow segregation.

Two weeks after the marchers were attacked, voting rights activists set out again from Selma, their ranks swelled this time by thousands of supporters who had poured into Alabama to help ensure the success of the march. Four days later, 25,000 marchers arrived in Montgomery. The Voting Rights Act was passed soon after.  
 
'Insult to the Black community'
The Forrest monument has been the center of controversy since it was erected. As Selma City Councilman Samuel Randolph stated at a January city council meeting, "The monument is an insult to the Black community and over 95 percent of the people in my district want it removed. Forrest murdered hundreds of Black soldiers, as well as founding the KKK."

Confederate general Forrest was defeated in Selma in April 1865 by Union Gen. James Wilson. Wilson was part of Gen. William Sherman's March to the Sea from Atlanta, Georgia, which sealed the defeat of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War. Forrest had been a slave trader, as well as plantation owner, before the war. In 1864 his troops massacred several hundred Black and white Union soldiers, including their commander, who had surrendered at Ft. Pillow, Tennessee.

Survivors testified later that many of the Black soldiers were buried alive. Forrest was found to be responsible for the massacre by the U.S. Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War in 1871. He was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which he helped to found in Tennessee in 1866.

The bust of Forrest had been approved by the previous Selma mayor, Joe Smitherman, but was not unveiled until last October, a few days after James Perkins Jr. was installed as Selma's first Black mayor. The bitterly contested September mayoral election had won considerable attention, because Smitherman had been in office 35 years, including during the 1965 voting rights march. Both Perkins and Smitherman are in the Democratic Party.

In 1964, when Smitherman was first elected, only about 150 Blacks were registered to vote in Selma. Like his mentor, late Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Smitherman later apologized for his segregationist past and made Black appointments to several offices. Although the city has been mostly Black for decades, he was able to win previous elections by getting most of the white votes and enough votes from middle-class Blacks to achieve a majority.

Many workers and farmers who are Black in the Selma area were heartened by Smitherman's defeat, and are hopeful that the new administration may make it possible for some positive changes to be made. But the controversy over the Forrest monument reflects the polarization which continues in response to a city administration headed by even a moderate Black political figure.

The Selma City Council voted to remove the monument to Forrest by December 11, but reversed itself after a November 19 march in support of the monument by nearly 300 people waving Confederate battle flags and singing "Dixie." The City Council indefinitely extended the deadline to move the monument, a decision that was met with protests, including one of 150 on Martin Luther King Day.

In response to the removal of Forrest's bust to the Confederate soldiers' cemetery, the Confederate Heritage Association is now pushing a bill in the Alabama State House to prevent any monument on state-owned property from being relocated, removed, disturbed, obscured, or desecrated. The director of the heritage group, Michael Chappell, told the Birmingham News that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference have on their national agendas "to wipe out Confederate heritages."

Patti Iiyama is a garment worker and a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Susan LaMont, also a member of UNITE, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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