Tennessee officials Friday rejected a plan to remove a statue of a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader from the statehouse amid a national controversy over how to display symbols of the Civil War, the Tennessean reported.
At a meeting of the state Capitol Commission in Nashville, Larry Martin of the Department of Finance and Administration requested a waiver to relocate a bust of Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — the KKK’s first grand wizard and a slave trader — to the state museum.
It was voted down 7 to 5, the Tennessean reported.
Defenders of the statue argued the statue commemorates the native Tennessean’s role as a general for the Confederacy, and removing it would be ignoring history. They also pointed out after Forrest ordered the KKK disbanded in 1869, he advocated for civil rights, the Tennessean reported.
State Rep. Curtis Johnson, a Republican from Clarksville, Tenn., said
