MS License Plate to Honor Gen.Forrest

[DixieDestroyer]

The MS SCV are attempting to honor legendary CSA General Nathan Bedford Forrest, whilst the bed wetting cultmarx vermin fight them tooth & nail.

Miss. license plate proposed to honor KKK leader

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

The Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. â€" A fight is brewing in Mississippi over a proposal to issue specialty license plates honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Greg Stewart, a member of the Mississippi Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, displays a sample of the latest Civil War sesquicentennial tag that is being sold, left, adjacent to the current tag in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011. A fight is brewing in Mississippi over a proposal to issue specialty license plates honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Greg Stewart, a member of the Mississippi Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, displays a sample of the latest Civil War sesquicentennial tag that is being sold, left, adjacent to the current tag in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011. A fight is brewing in Mississippi over a proposal to issue specialty license plates honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Greg Stewart, a member of the Mississippi Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, displays a sample of the latest Civil War sesquicentennial tag that is being sold, during a visit to the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011. A fight is brewing in Mississippi over a proposal to issue specialty license plates honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans wants to sponsor a series of state-issued license plates to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which it calls the "War Between the States." The group proposes a different design each year between now and 2015, with Forrest slated for 2014.

"Seriously?" state NAACP president Derrick Johnson said when he was told about the Forrest plate. "Wow."

Forrest, a Tennessee native, is revered by some as a military genius and reviled by others for leading an 1864 massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tenn. Forrest was a Klan grand wizard in Tennessee after the war.

Sons of Confederate Veterans member Greg Stewart said he believes Forrest distanced himself from the Klan later in life. It's a point many historians agree upon, though some believe it was too little, too late, because the Klan had already turned violent before Forrest left.

"If Christian redemption means anything â€" and we all want redemption, I think â€" he redeemed himself in his own time, in his own actions, in his own words," Stewart said. "We should respect that."

State Department of Revenue spokeswoman Kathy Waterbury said legislators would have to approve a series of Civil War license plates. She said if every group that has a specialty license plate wanted a redesign every year, it would take an inordinate amount of time from Department of Revenue employees who have other duties.

SCV has not decided what the Forrest license plate would look like, Stewart said. Opponents are using their imagination.

A Facebook group called "Mississippians Against The Commemoration Of Grand Wizard Nathan Forrest" features a drawing of a hooded klansman in the center of a regular Mississippi car tag.

Robert McElvaine, director of the history department at the private Millsaps College in Jackson, joined the Facebook group. McElvaine said Forrest's role at Fort Pillow and involvement in the Klan make him unworthy of being honored.

"The idea of celebrating such a person, whatever his accomplishments in other areas may have been, seems like a very poor idea," McElvaine told The Associated Press.

Mississippi lawmakers have shown a decidedly laissez-faire attitude toward allowing a wide variety of groups to have speciality license plates, which usually sell for an extra $30 to $50 a year. The state sells more than 100 specialty plates for everything from wildlife conservation to breast cancer awareness. One design says "God Bless America," another depicts Elvis Presley. Among the biggest sellers are NASCAR designs and one with the slogan "Choose Life."

The Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has had a state-issued specialty license plate since 2003 to raise money for restoration of Civil War-era flags. From 2003 through 2010, the design featured a small Confederate battle flag.

The Department of Revenue allowed the group to revise the license plate this year for the first of the Civil War sesquicentennial designs. The 2011 plate, now on sale, depicts the Beauvoir mansion in Biloxi, Miss., the final home of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president.

SCV wants license plates to feature Civil War battles that took place in Mississippi. It proposes a Battle of Corinth design for 2012 and Siege of Vicksburg design for 2013. Stewart said the 2015 plate would be a tribute to Confederate veterans.

Johnson, with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he's not bothered by Civil War commemorative license plates generally. But he said Mississippi shouldn't honor Forrest, who was an early leader of what he calls "a terrorist group."

"He should be viewed in the same light that we view Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden," Johnson said of Forrest. "The state of Mississippi should deny any vanity tags which would highlight racial hatred in this state."

Democratic Rep. Willie Bailey, who handles license plate requests in the House, said he has no problem with SCV seeking any design it wants.

"If they want a tag commemorating veterans of the Confederacy, I don't have a problem with it," said Bailey, who is black. "They have that right. We'll look at it. As long as it's not offensive to anybody, then they have the same rights as anybody else has."

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/miss-license-plate-proposed-833632.html

 

[jaxvid]

I don't think the government should have all of these special license plates, heck I don't even like the ones that say "kids, just love them" (yuck), let alone a clearly controversial figure. You gotta give them credit for balls though, Nathan Forest? That's is one controversial dude, supporting him takes a lot of cajones.

 

[Colonel_Reb]

This issue is getting a lot of press nationally this weekend and a couple of people I know have been interviewed about their stance in favor of it, as representatives of the SCV. Haley Barbour said he wouldn't condemn the tag or the man, but he also said he doubts it will pass the state legislature and be produced. If it does pass it will be a pleasant surprise to me.

 

[DixieDestroyer]

All the racially castrated, candy@$$, limp-wristed pansies are up in arms over my SCV brethren. Those libtards can kiss my rebel @$$!

On Civil War Anniversary, Confederate Group Stirs Debate

By CLAIRE SUDDATH Claire Suddath â€" Fri Mar 4, 4:10 am ET

In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the "Fort Pillow massacre" in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)

Now, in honor of the Civil War's 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi license plate. But the state government opposes it. When asked to comment on the proposal, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, told the Associated Press, "It won't become law because I won't sign it." (See a history of photographing the nation's war dead.)

Barbour's reaction is just one sign that things have changed since the South commemorated the Civil War's centennial in 1961. Back then, much of the South was still segregated - and many people, including Mississippi's then Governor Ross Barnett, were fighting to keep it that way. State and local governments took an active role in Confederate celebrations, using them to promote their causes. When the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, a group sponsored by the federal government, held its inaugural event in a Charleston, S.C., hotel, Madaline Williams, a delegate from the New Jersey legislature, was denied entry because she was black. For this year's anniversary, there is no such commission.

And in February of this year, when a Jefferson Davis impersonator was sworn in on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol for a re-enactment of the Confederate States of America's 1861 presidential inauguration, Alabama officials stayed away. Similarly, a December "Secession Ball" held in Charleston drew protests and a candlelight vigil by the NAACP. (See pictures of the Cold War's influence on art.)

This year's Civil War anniversary caps a decade in which Southern institutions have struggled mightily with the racial undertones of their Confederate monuments. In 2001 Georgia redesigned its state flag, shrinking the Confederate battle emblem that had adorned it since 1956. Six years later, it removed the symbol altogether. The University of Mississippi - the same school that endured riots when James Meredith became the school's first African-American student in 1962 - ditched its mascot Colonel Rebel, a plantation owner, in 2003. And last November, a federate appellate court upheld a Tennessee school district's ban on Confederate-themed clothing.

As much of the South continues to distance itself from its racially divisive past, the organizations fighting to maintain the prominence of Confederate symbols are pushed further right of the mainstream. Nonetheless, the SCV plans several highly publicized events over the next four years, as various Civil Warâ€"related anniversaries come up. The club has 840 local chapters across 29 states, plus Europe and Australia. It was founded in 1896; aspiring members must prove direct relation to a former Confederate veteran in order to join. The SCV openly denounces the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups that use the Confederate flag as a racist symbol. Former President Harry S. Truman and Clint Eastwood are often cited as members. (See a TIME Q&A on how America fights its wars.)

But even as the SCV rejects traditional symbols of racism, it provokes debate with its promotion of contentious Civil War leaders like Forrest. "Robert E. Lee has been replaced as the great [Confederate] hero by Nathan Bedford Forrest by these Southern white heritage groups," says Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which investigates extremist groups. Lee owned slaves, Potok says, but "he was very much a statesman, and at the end of the Civil War, he encouraged Southerners to rejoin the Union in heart and soul. Forrest was very much not like that. The fact that they want to honor him specifically says a lot about what they stand for."

Chuck Rand, a member of the SCV, calls any assumption that the Forrest license plate is racist a "knee-jerk reaction" by people who don't understand the "real causes" of the Civil War. Or, as he calls it, "The war for Southern independence." But critics point out that slavery isn't addressed in these commemorations. The group's re-enactment of Davis' inauguration took place near Martin Luther King Jr.'s old Montgomery, Ala., church and the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955. But during the event, there was no mention of the South's racial history.

The SCV's controversial events often make the news, but its perspective on the war and its causes doesn't get much traction. In December, the History Channel refused to run one of the SCV's commercials, which blamed the North for slavery, claiming that slaves were essentially forced onto Southern plantation owners. Another commercial, also refused by the History Channel, claimed that the Civil War was "not a civil war ... [but] a war in which Southerners fought to defend their homes and families against an aggressive invasion by federal troops." (Comment on this story.)

"Lincoln waged a war to conquer his neighbor," Rand explains. "In our view, he was an aggressor against another nation, just as Hitler was an aggressor against other nations." Most people, Southern or otherwise, are not likely to agree with such an inflammatory statement, but the sentiment underlying Rand's assertion has deep roots. "Coming out of the experience of the Civil War and Southern Reconstruction, there was a sense of wounded pride and grievance," says James Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia and the author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. But even if racism, intolerance and discrimination still plague the South - as they do the rest of the country - the sense of regional separateness on those issues has largely diminished. "Time has passed," says Cobb. "To uphold the Confederacy in this way has become a fairly extreme position."

Extreme or not, the SCV isn't giving up the fight. The group pledges to advance its cause through parades, advertisements and the battle for commemorative license plates. The South may never rise again, Rand admits, but that doesn't mean it has to disappear completely. "The North is a direction," he says. "The South is a place."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110304/us_time/08599205598100

Edited by: DixieDestroyer

 

[Colonel_Reb]

That "article" is full of factual errors and inaccuracies, but I would expect nothing more from the anti-South/White/Christian media. These attacks are linked to the attacks we see on White athletes, and they underscore the reality that the assault is along a wide front, trying to permanently destroy our culture. I've been trying to get people to realize this for years.

 

[DixieDestroyer]

The SCV scores a win for honoring their kin (& a win for the 1st Amendment).

Confederate Flag License Plates OK'd

Sons Of Confederate Veterans Had Sued Over License Plates 2 Years Ago

POSTED: Friday, April 1, 2011

A judge rules that the flag falls under guidelines of Florida's "specialty plate" program, which is considered a forum of free speech.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- In Florida, drivers have dozens of options when it comes to their license plates: They can support wildlife, a favorite college, the Orlando Magic or even proclaim opposition to abortion.

One option they don't have -- the Confederate flag -- has been at the center of a heated debate in the state for years. Lawmakers don't think it's appropriate. But a federal judge has ruled otherwise.

The judge ruled that the flag falls under guidelines of the "specialty plate" program, which is considered a forum of free speech.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans filed a lawsuit two years ago after the Legislature and the Department of Motor Vehicles didn't approve a plate that features Confederate flags and coats worn by Florida Confederate soldiers.

The judge's order does not completely clear the way for the plate to be created. The group will now have to go back and ask lawmakers to sign off on it.


http://www.clickorlando.com/news/27393204/detail.html#

Edited by: DixieDestroyer