The 9:01: In punishing Memphis, state lawmakers embarrassed themselves

Today was supposed to be about chicken, but oh Tennessee, you can’t even let us have that.

The first Memphis location of the family-owned Nashville “hot chicken” restaurant Hattie B’s opens today, on the path that connects Overton Square to Cooper-Young. Yesterday, I joined food writer Jennifer Biggs and a couple of other colleagues for a taste test and was going to lead today with that, with musings anew on the Memphis/Nashville Thing (which I wrote about extensively here), with the suggestion that a spicy leg of chicken be seen more as olive branch than cultural incursion.

But last night the state legislature decided to add discordant notes to this promise of Tennessee harmony. Fifty-six representatives from across the state voted to cut $250,000 appropriated to Memphis for next year’s bicentennial celebration as punishment (punishment!) for the city’s removal late last year of statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest from two public parks.

“Nashville” is used as shorthand for the state legislature, because that’s where the dirt goes down. But your primary quarrel today, Memphis, does not lie there. It lies in places such as Parkers Crossroads (Steve McDaniel), and Dresden (Andy Holt), and Jonesborough (Matthew Hill). These are the homes of the legislators who sponsored this amendment and who were most vocal in their support of it. These are people who have no care for this city or its history or its world-altering culture and yet feel like it is their right to try to dictate to us whom we choose to honor in our own public spaces, decisions that have absolutely no bearing on their own lives. And when they find that they can no longer dictate that, they think it is their place (as mostly white rural men) to punish (a mostly black city). To crack the whip, so to speak.

Memphis is not like other parts of Tennessee

I’ll confess that I could not locate these places on a map. This is not because I’m a snooty urbanite who knows nothing of small towns and rural communities. I grew up in small towns and rural communities and still spend a lot of time in them. But they’re all across the river.

Memphis is like that. It’s a regional city. Many Memphians have a Tennessee orientation. Perhaps just as many do not. For many of us, the happenings in New Orleans and Little Rock and Oxford and Birmingham and St. Louis feel as relevant as those in Nashville and much more so than the happenings in Knoxville, much less Dresden or Parkers Crossroads. A lot of this state, as Memphis Rep. Raumesh Akbari noted from the floor last night, real pain in her voice, doesn’t want us. These feelings are not entirely unrequited.

The rationale for this vote, of course, is to punish Memphis for finding a legal route around the so-called Tennessee Historical Commission, somehow populated by members of the fringe Sons of Confederate Veterans, which attempted to block the city’s removal of these Confederate monuments, like so many governors before a schoolhouse door.

This is bad faith following bad faith. The so-called Tennessee Historical Commission squandered its legitimacy, or perhaps never had any, by stamping its name on historical elisions that carried racist intent and then attempting to block correctives. In Memphis, the National Park Service has had to step in to assert truths that serious historians know and the state of Tennessee would rather avoid. It is this imprimatur you’ll find on markers that respect history.

► GoFundMe: Effort has been launched to recover the $250,000 cut by legislators

Historical Ignorance

Those who voted against Memphis last night cloak themselves proudly in historical ignorance, but it is not because they were poorly taught this history, though generations of Americans were poorly taught this history.

No, it is not really about a past they refuse to understand, that they desperately decline to know. It is about a present they want to thwart.

Holt, who is not a smart man, referred to the monuments that Memphis lawfully removed from its own parks as “historical monuments.” This is technically true, in the sense that they were monuments to historical figures. But the monuments themselves were not historical. They were political. Their meaning derived chiefly from the circumstances of their creation, not from their purported subjects. This is not new in Memphis. This is review.

The Nathan Bedford Forrest monument, dedicated in 1905, and maintained by an organization rooted in Lost Cause mythologies, was a Jim Crow monument. It did not represent Civil War history. It represented a renewed commitment to white supremacy in the aftermath of Reconstruction. It once represented the voting majorities of Memphis. It did so no longer.

That sorry Jefferson Davis statue, dedicated in 1964, was not a Civil War monument. In fact, it obscured the real and rich Civil War history that happened on the land around it. It was a segregationist monument. It represented a resistance to integration and the civil rights movement of its time. It was a contemporary expression of the power structure in Memphis. So was its removal.

Those who voted to punish Memphis don't really care about history

Holt had the gall and the truly profound yet entirely unsurprising ignorance to say this on the chamber floor last night: “We can’t erase history. That’s what ISIS does. They erase history. They destroy history. So that they cannot learn the lessons from history.” If this man has read a decent book on the subject of American Civil War-era history, I'd be shocked.

Holt and others who voted to punish Memphis last night don’t actually care about any of this.

Anyone clinging to long-corrupted memories of the Confederacy in 2018 is not doing so out of a respect for history or fealty to ancestors. It is about a present, political resistance. Their vote was their own statement against the rich diversity and shifting values of a city that is not their own. A city that does not know them and does not want to. It was a small, pathetic spitball aimed at modernity.

Memphis representative Antonio Parkinson stood in the chamber last night and called the vote racist. He was booed by men who resented being confronted with what they are.

If this vote brings national humiliation on those who cast it and retroactive humiliation on the members of the so-called Tennessee Historical Commission who voted to protect the lies, it will be money well spent.

Anyway, about the chicken? We'll revisit that tomorrow.

The Fadeout: I've spun this song at the end of this column before, but it deserves an encore. Inspirational Verse:

So I walk the streets of Memphis

But I'll have you understand

That Tennessee is not the state I'm in

Reach Chris Herrington at chris.herrington@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter at @chrisherrington and @herringtonNBA.