Suggested Miss. License Plate Honoring American Terrorist, War Criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest

In trying to wrap our minds around this story, the first obstacle to it is the realization that this is 2011 — more than one-half century after the seminal civil rights landmark court case and legislation, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lynchings and hate crimes are now against the law, and the disgrace of all-white juries acquitting murderers of civil rights workers, terrorist bombers of black churches, killers of African American men, women and children in the Deep South are no longer tolerated.

Or so we thought. The Southern disgrace of the former Confederate states' racist history is being whitewashed, literally and figuratively, by a pustular eruption of Southern pride and Civil War revisionist history groups (the "War of Northern Aggression" was all about "states' rights" and not slavery) crawling out from under their rocks, when only a few years ago they wouldn't have dared revive the open and ugly bigotry of their elders. One such group in Mississippi, Sons of the Confederacy, has proposed a state license plate "honoring" American terrorist, war criminal and ideological racist — as founder of the terroristic Ku Klux Klan — Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general, instigated and initiated war crimes that would meet the standard of death by hanging set by history's greatest war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg which tried Nazi war criminals and exacted the ultimate punishment for the atrocities they committed. Here is an excerpt from the Southern Law Poverty Center's report on the real Nathan Bedford Forrest:

Union Gen. William Sherman, no slouch himself, described him as a "devil" who should be "hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury."But there was more to Forrest than that. He was renowned for a terrifying temper that transformed him into something resembling a blood-engorged beast. He personally shot his own men if they tried to shirk a battle. He was given to duels and furious arguments, oversaw savage whippings of recalcitrant slaves, shaded the truth in his own behalf repeatedly, and once wrongly shot innocent "deserters."

The severest of the criticism of Forrest — subjects studiously avoided by today's neo-Confederate activists — centers on three indisputable facts:

• Forrest was a Memphis slave trader who acquired fabulous wealth before the war;

• He commanded the troops who carried out an 1864 massacre of mostly black prisoners; and

• He led violent resistance to Reconstruction as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Obviously, the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP was deeply offended by this latest resurgence of white Southern organized bigotry, an attempt to re-mythologize their craven Civil War history, and has asked Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to stop this. It is part of a much broader pattern of historical revisionism that is right wing, racist and ideological in its aim to pollute the teaching of science and history. The confluence of these forces include Civil War revisionists and states' righters, Christian fundamentalists, nativists, and Tea Party activists.

Against this backdrop, Mississippi Governor and presidential hopeful Barbour has refused to do the right, decent and responsible thing, which is to reject attempts by one extremist organization to revive his  state's racist past:

Here is one FACTUAL historical depiction of Nathan Bedford Forrest's crimes suggested for the Mississippi license plate proposed by the Sons of the Confederacy: In this bracingly pastoral scene from Harper's Weekly issue of May 21, 1864, Forrest is pictured shooting and killing a captured free black man. Racist applicants may also choose a depiction of Forrest's slaughter of federal troops who were trying to negotiate their surrender under a white flag while Forrest illegally improved his position. Further, racist white supremacist license plate applicants have a choice of Swastika or Confederate flag to adorn their pick-up trucks, gun racks and all, with the racist hate symbol of their choice and ideological proclivity:

Back in the 60s at the height of the struggle for civil rights, one of the great troubadors of that era, Neil Young, wrote this powerful and evocative song, "Southern Man," that was meant in a sense to celebrate the shifting tide of the Deep South's heinous and despicable racist history — one that was kept alive mostly by angry, bigoted white males. I wonder how true these words ring today; or is it yet another ironic reminder that the "arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice"— yet the event horizon seems to be always just out of reach. Neil seems to be conceding as much in this 2000 CSNY version in which the last verse, "Lily Belle" ... opens the song after the chorus:

SOUTHERN MAN

By Neil Young

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

Lily Belle,
your hair is golden brown
I've seen your black man
comin' round
Swear by God
I'm gonna cut him down!
I heard screamin'
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

I saw cotton
and I saw black
Tall white mansions
and little shacks.
Southern man
when will you
pay them back?
I heard screamin'
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man