On July 11, 1998, approximately 400 people gathered on a narrow strip of private land alongside Interstate 65 to dedicate a 25-foot equestrian statue of Confederate Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest — the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Sons of Confederate Veterans organized the ceremony. A woman believed to be the last surviving widow of a Confederate soldier was in attendance. So was State Senator Douglas Henry.
The statue was made of polyurethane — the same material used to make bathtubs. The horse was covered in gold leaf. Forrest himself was covered in silver leaf. Thirteen Confederate flags surrounded it. It was visible from the northbound lanes of I-65 near mile marker 77.
It was, by any reasonable standard, one of the worst pieces of sculpture ever inflicted on a major American city.
The sculptor was Jack Kershaw, a Vanderbilt alumnus, co-founder of the white nationalist League of the South, and — most notably — a former attorney for James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. Kershaw had represented Ray starting in 1977, promoting the theory that Ray was a “patsy” in a government conspiracy. He eventually persuaded Ray to take a polygraph test for Playboy magazine. The results indicated Ray was lying about his innocence. Ray fired Kershaw.
Bill Dorris, the Nashville businessman who owned the land and commissioned the statue, described Kershaw’s artistic process to NPR: “Jack got some materials that I use to make bathtubs with. And he started with a butcher knife. That’s the end result that you see out there right now.”
As an artist: mediocre. As a thinker, Dorris said, Kershaw was “way ahead of a lot of people in his time.” At the statue’s unveiling, Kershaw offered his own assessment of the Confederacy’s legacy: “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.”
The statue’s face bore almost no resemblance to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Critics said it looked like a man who had just sat on a thumbtack. Rachel Maddow described it as having “terrifying marble blue eyes” and a “mouth like a circular saw.” John Oliver said the face looked “like if a nickel did cocaine.” Stephen Colbert said it proved “the Confederacy was founded by skirt-wearing nutcrackers riding wet lizards.” The Washington Post called the horse “a golden steed that looks like it was ripped from a merry-go-round for giants.” Salon said it appeared to have been “fashioned by someone who’s had a human described to him but has never actually seen one in real life.”
Around Nashville, many people just called it the Hamburglar — because the plasticine material and the pop-eyed, cartoonish face made it look less like a Civil War general and more like a character from a McDonald’s playground.
The statue stood for 23 years.
It was shot at. It was spray-painted with “Monster.” Protesters once tried to pull it down by tying it to a train. In 2017, someone doused it in bright pink paint. Dorris left the pink paint on, saying it made the statue more visible. The Metro Council tried to plant landscaping to block the view from the interstate; the Tennessee Department of Transportation denied the request.
Dorris called slavery “social security” for African Americans — “a cradle-to-the-grave proposition.” He said he’d turned down requests from the KKK to hold rallies at the site. He told Canada’s National Post that people opposing Confederate monuments were “cane blacks” who were “probably illegals to start with.”
He had 1,800-foot flagpoles ready to go, he said, if anyone tried to block the view. “They’re going to have to build a helluva wall and a helluva bunch of trees to block all that.”
Then he died.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons