Free Republic

A private college in West Virginia said Wednesday it is removing the name of the late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd from its health center, saying his name had caused “divisiveness and pain" without explicitly noting his complicated past on racial matters. Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s but subsequently denounced the organization. He served in the Senate for 51 years and died in 2010 at age 92. Bethany College President Tamara Rodenberg said on the school's website that Byrd's name will be removed from the college's Robert C. Byrd Health Center “to demonstrate...

Robert C. Byrd's name has been removed from the Bethany College Health Center. The move was prompted by the ongoing national conversations about race relations in America. "The last few weeks, and well before the conversations and calls for change took hold, we recognized as a campus that the name of our Robert C. Byrd Health Center created divisiveness and pain for members of Bethany community, both past and present." According to a letter, posted on the college's website, from President Tamara Rodenberg, Ph.D., the move is "to demonstrate Bethany College’s capacity to change, to listen, and to learn." Byrd,...

If accepted at the time, the design would have likely revolutionized architecture. ======================================================================== In the early 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci designed a hypothetical bridge for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. It was rejected. Over 500 years later, an MIT team has recreated the design with a model and have showed that it would have worked. Da Vinci's design incorporates architectural techniques that would have not been seen for another 300 years. ========================================================================== Gretchen Ertl ========================================================================= Researchers at MIT have proven Leonardo da Vinci correct yet again, this time involving his design for what would have been at the time...

A black man who was shot inside Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) last week claims it was a 'hate crime' carried out by a group of white supremacists who dropped the N-word before opening fire on him. DeJuan Young, 33, was shot in the arm on Saturday amid a weekend of gun violence in the police-free zone, also known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), that left two people wounded and a 19-year-old man dead.

Boston and Dallas have one each. New York City has not one, but two Malcolm X boulevards, along with a playground. Washington D.C. has Malcolm X Avenue. The Los Angeles City Council renamed the intersection near the Bilal Islamic Center, Malcolm X Way. These are a few of the hundreds of streets, schools, and assorted other civic infrastructure named after the black supremacist leader who worked together with the KKK and the American Nazi Party.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) – The Tennessee Department of Transportation has “respectfully denied” the Metro Council’s request to block the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on Interstate 65. The council approved a resolution to ask TDOT to plant trees blocking its view to the public on July 8. The statue, which is surrounded by Confederate flags, sits on private property near the Harding Place exit. Monday, the department sent the following statement to News 2: TDOT does not plant foliage on its right-of-way with the sole intention of blocking items on private property based on what might be offensive to some and...

A bid by Tennessee’s governor to remove a bust of Confederate cavalry general, slave trader and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state Capitol building was rejected Friday. The State Capitol Commission voted 7-5 against issuing a petition to moving the bust from the Capitol to the new state museum being built nearby. It would have been the first step in a lengthy process laid out by Tennessee’s “Heritage Protection Act” that limits the removal or changing of historical memorials on public property. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam called for the removal after last month’s deadly white...

The Memphis City Council has ordered the removal of the NB Forrest Statue that sits on top of the graves of General and Mrs. NB Forrest. This action breaks several laws and the order of the State for Memphis to not make any action toward the historical monument and grave site.

(CNN) The remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife will be removed from a Memphis park where a monument of him once stood. The decision to move their remains came after the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a non-profit organization of male descendants of Confederate veterans, agreed to drop a pending lawsuit against park owners

The quotes below appear towards the end of the linked article about Gen Forrest's complicated life. I found them to be so remarkable that if you don't read anything else about the self-described "most maligned" Southerner, you should read these words. For hidden in them is a remarkable story redemption and change. It brought tears to my eyes.

In 2020’s version of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost any statue or monument that predates or doesn’t explicitly honor the Civil Rights era is a potential target for being defaced, damaged, or toppled entirely, Taliban-style. The woke social justice warriors who have somehow managed to seize the culture don’t seem to concern themselves much with whether these monuments honor Jefferson Davis, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, or even famous abolitionist Matthias Baldwin. To them, these are just dead old white dudes who belong in the dustbin of history because, well, they were probably evil, engaged...

Call it “omission journalism.” On June 14th, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran this headline: "More than 1 million sign petition to designate KKK as terrorist group." The AJC story said, in part, this: “More than 1 million people have signed an online petition calling for the government to designate the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization. The “Change KKK status into Terrorist Organization” campaign is one of at least three petitions that have gone viral on the change.org website since George Floyd’s death, according to Newsweek." The heading of the next section of the story reads: “A history of terror”...

According to the Left, White supremacists are everywhere. Their narrative is that Trump has emboldened these haters. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been screaming about how racist hate groups are "dangerously" on the rise. Charlottesville was supposedly proof of this. All our cultural institutions are obsessed with racism. The media, academia, Hollywood, Liberal activists, and Democrat politicians all tell us that racism in America is every bit as prevalent as it ever was, it's just less overt. In order to convince us that this is true, they scare people into thinking that a small handful of losers and misfits...

I hope everyone watches this outstanding 2 minute video, and that Twitter doesn't delete it. I'll post the transcript below.  Click to view the video (turn sound up)To the feckless, hypocritical, virtue-signaling Democrat leaders of AmericaYou took the time to kneel for George Floyd so you could pretend to care about black people, but I know the truth, the truth you continue to ignore.So now allow me to call you on the carpet for your many failures in the black community that you refuse to acknowledge.How about kneeling to acknowledge that the worst riots and the worst instances of police...

The great irony here is that yes, there’s plenty of systemic racism in our country; it’s all wrapped up in the history of the Democratic Party. The rot goes deep, back to the post-Civil War era. Former slaves and their children were forced for decades to endure the cruel, wretched Jim Crow laws that kept them from advancing in the South. And who was all too happy to keep those laws in place? The Democrats. Systemic racism is indeed a vile problem, one that must be addressed immediately. When Democrats stop pointing fingers and look in the mirror, we can...

A newly-unearthed clip of Joe Biden shows the then-senator referring to members of a female Confederacy group as “fine people” during a 1993 Senate hearing. During the Senate confirmation hearing for then-nominee to the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Biden, the sitting Senate Judiciary Chairman, made a surprising comment about the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization committed to preserving Confederate statues with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

Confederate monuments are being taken down or vandalized in cities across the country in the wake of George Floyd's death in police custody -- but so far the revived push to remove symbols of slavery and segregation has largely overlooked the late Democratic senator who was a former Ku Klux Klan member yet later rejected those views. West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd's legacy is visible throughout his home state of West Virginia, with his name on numerous buildings and roads. Byrd was a former member of the Klu Klux Klan who later regretted that affiliation, renounced his past views supporting...

DAVIS, Calif — It did not take long before the Davis Mr. Pickles sandwich shop was closed down by corporate officials. Not even days after the owner of the franchise sent an email to employees comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Klu Klux Klan, the store was closed. In a statement posted to social media, corporate officials called the comments "alarming and painful," adding that the store will only open under new ownership if it does. The email, sent by former owner Mickey Mann, read, in part, "The BLM is the flip side of the KKK. Their tactics...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needs to ask herself what party she’s a member of and who those ‘slaveholder’ statues really represent. And SPARE US the BS magical history that Democrats use to pretend their party wasn’t filled with racist monsters who founded the KKK. Those slaveholders would have been in AOC’s party … think she understands that? That’s a rhetorical question, FYI. People really need to ask themselves why their communities chose to erect statues to slaveholders instead of abolitionists.— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2020 Tone-deaf is the phrase of the day, folks. You might want to ask why you are...

The petitions began to go viral following the death of George Floyd, and after it was reported a Virginia man who is accused of driving into a crowd of protesters is a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. More than 500,000 people have signed several petitions calling for the KKK to be designated as a terrorist organization. The KKK is currently classified as a domestic extremist group rather than a terrorist organization. Groups like ISIS, Boko Haram and al Qaeda are listed as terrorist organizations as they are international groups that threaten the security of the U.S. There are currently...