It’s easy to hear the words Heritage Protection Act and assume the law has been on the books in Tennessee for a long time. But it hasn’t. It was only introduced in 2013.
The sponsor of the bill, representative Steve McDaniel, stood at a podium on the house floor shooting down question after question. “If the gentleman would read the bill …” he chided a colleague.
He argued the new bill was designed to protect all statues or monuments of war.
“The definition of ‘all’ means ‘everything,'” he quipped when questioned.
But it was clear the battle lines were already drawn. Black lawmakers like Memphis Rep. Joe Towns Jr. were not buying what McDaniel was selling.
“The fact remains that we understand exactly … everybody is whispering about what is going on with this particular bill and what it’s directed to,” he said.
His hunch was that the law was predominantly to keep in place some symbols and not others, and he wasn’t far off.
The bill’s introduction came on the heels of Memphis removing the names of Confederate soldiers from a few parks. The only states in the country that had similar laws were Confederate states. And Tennessee’s version of the Heritage Protection Act was even written by a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Creating legal obstacles
Lee Millar says he saw a need for an act like this in Tennessee, which is home to the Sons of Confederate Veterans headquarters.
So he wrote it.
For him, the fight to protect these statues is a personal one. He’s a descendent of the man whose bust just moved out of the state capitol: Nathan Bedford Forrest himself.
Forrest was a slave trader and a grand wizard of the KKK. But Millar says he was a war hero who helped rebuild the South. He wishes more context could have been put up, instead of moving the statue to a museum.
“That’s the reason for the Heritage Protection Act,” he says. “To help ensure that these things are just not taken down willy-nilly by some activist loud mouth group that wants to complain.”
Paige Pfleger WPLN NewsA sign thanking protesters was placed in front of the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest after the state building commission voted to remove the statue from the capitol on July 22, 2021.
Forrest’s bust had been protested for so long that one of the activists who led the movement against it died before it was taken down.
And it’s removal went through the process laid out in the law: there were hearings, waiting periods, and opportunities for appeal.
The law, which was tightened with amendments in 2016 and 2018, can take so much time and resources that it seems unachievable to surmount it — only four petitions have made it through.
It gives voting power to the Tennessee Historical Commission, which didn’t have a habit of weighing in on controversy before this act. And for good reason, too — after they voted to remove Forrest, the reaction was swift.
Lawmakers threatened to get rid of the commission altogether.
The bill’s architect, Millar, blamed Gov. Bill Lee for having adjusted his stance.
And activists celebrated, shouting “Bye, Forrest, bye!” as his likeness was removed.
From the outside, Lecia Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center says the entire episode put overdue attention on Tennessee.
Tennessee’s position in the South
Brooks says when most people think of the Deep South, they think of places like Mississippi or Alabama but maybe not Tennessee. But she argues that when it comes to Confederate monuments and erecting policies to keep them there, the state stands out.
“Tennessee is particularly recalcitrant in their pushback,” Brooks says. “Back to Nathan Bedford Forrest — that’s a fight that would be lost in Alabama.”
That may be in part because of the presence of the Sons of Confederate Veterans here, she says. The group, which was founded in 1896, was influential in reframing the Civil War and erecting monuments to the Confederacy.
“Most people think that, ‘Oh my gosh these monuments went up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to honor the war dead,’ and that’s not true,” she says.
Instead, she says the statues were a reaction to Black progress.
Her organization found there were two peak times when statues went up in the South: the first was in the early 1900s, at the height of Jim Crow. The second was during the Civil Rights Movement. That’s when Tennessee lawmakers approved the Forrest bust — 100 years after the war, but only a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
More: View the Confederate monuments timeline by the Southern Poverty Law Center (PDF).
“They put these things in public space where Black people would go and see this outsized monument to a Confederate general,” she says. “And they would know that you may be freed on paper but white supremacy is really the law of the land.”
The statues were put up to send a message, she says.
On the day of the final vote to remove Forrest from the capitol, Nashville Sen. Brenda Gilmore stood outside the hearing room reflecting on whether laws like the Heritage Protection Act intend to send a message, too.
“I don’t know if there is enough will in the General Assembly to change it,” Gilmore says. “But it certainly is a cumbersome process and it makes it very difficult to right a wrong. And this clearly is a wrong, for Nathan Bedford Forrest to be in the state capitol.”
The Forrest bust is one example of a Confederate monument being relocated. But more than 100 remain in public view, and state law intends to keep them there.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the last name of state Rep. Joe Towns.
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