Memphis city residents tore down two confederate statues after the Memphis City Council voted late Wednesday to sell the parks within which they resided.
The city sold Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park to the nonprofit Memphis Greenspace, Mayor Jim Strickland announced on Twitter. The sale allowed Memphis to avoid having to adhere to the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act which prohibits removing, renaming, or relocating memorials that sit on public property. Given that the city voted to transfer the parks into private ownership, Memphis became free to do what it willed with the parks’ contents.
“History is being made in Memphis tonight,” Memphis chief legal officer, Bruce McMullen, said at a news conference after the vote.
The city didn’t waste any time taking the confederate monuments down following the council’s vote. Health Sciences Park’s statue of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest came down around 9 p.m. and Memphis Park’s statue of Jefferson Davis — the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War — was taken down roughly 15 minutes later, according to The New York Times. A crowd of onlookers cheered and sang “Hit the road Jack,” TheNYT reports.
“As we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, it’s important that these relics of the Confederacy and defenders of slavery don’t continue to be displayed in prominent places in our city,” Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen said in a statement, praising the statues’ removal.
These statues are few in the line of many confederate monuments across America that have been taken down in recent months. The city of Dallas voted to take down a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee from park grounds in a 13-1 vote in August. A North Carolinian judge also dropped felony charges Tuesday against seven individuals accused of toppling a Confederate monument, according to WNCT 9.
President Donald Trump criticized the removal of historical monuments, asking if we should be eliminating the history of our founding fathers and presidents from public places. “George Washington as a slave owner,” he said. “So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”
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