Museum pieces

A SLAVE-TRADER before the civil war and a luminary of the Ku Klux Klan after it, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate officer (pictured), reputedly oversaw a massacre of black Union soldiers. Unsurprisingly, many black (and other) Americans resent his veneration in public statues and school names—just one of many rows over the commemoration of Confederate leaders and post-war segregationists roiling American towns and states. Among the monuments that the mayor of New Orleans wants to move, for example, is one to the Battle of Liberty Place, an insurrection by white supremacists nine years after the war ended. The guiding principle in these stand-offs should be that, when public land and resources are used in a way that causes widespread offence, as preserving these state-sponsored tributes does, the authorities should have a good reason for doing so. In this case, they don’t.After June’s racist massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a gunman who posed with the Confederate colours, the flag was tactfully lowered at the state capitol and elsewhere. Yet for devotees of these relics—as in South Carolina, where a statue of Ben Tillman, a violently racist post-war governor, still stands in the capitol’s grounds, despite efforts to evict it—giving up the flag was a tactical retreat. They make three main arguments for keeping Forrest and his kind on their plinths: each looks powerful but is mistaken.