Todd Starnes, Fox News, June 26, 2015

Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton wants to dig up the bodies of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife and remove them from a city park in the latest and perhaps most despicable example of the anti-Southern cleansing spreading across the nation.

“Which African-American wants to have a picnic in the shadow of Nathan Bedford Forrest?” Wharton said in a Thursday press briefing.

In addition to desecrating the graves, Wharton wants to tear down a massive statue honoring the Confederate general who was involved in organizing the Ku Klux Klan. The bodies of Forrest and his wife would be relocated to a cemetery.

“These relics, these messages of this despicable period of this great nation, it’s time for those to be moved,” the mayor said.

Memphis city officials have been waging a fierce and unrelenting war on southern heritage. In 2013, the city council changed the name of Forrest Park to Health Sciences Park. They also changed the names of Jefferson Davis Park and Confederate Park.

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“I despise what the Confederacy stood for,” Wharton said. “This is not just an ordinary monument. This is a monument to a man who was the avowed founder of the organization that has as its purpose the intimidation, the oppression of black folks.”

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Myron Lowery, the black city council chairman, said the statue is a “symbol of bigotry, a symbol of hate.”

“I’m not trying to change history, history is what it is, but in 2015, this day and age is much different that it was 100 years ago,” he said.

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