KKK asks panel to keep school named after ‘grand wizard’ of white-supremacist group
Nathan Bedford Forrest (nps.gov)
Here’s the latest in the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff story about a school in Florida that is still named after the first “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan. A current “imperial kaltrop” of the KKK has written a letter to members of the Duval County School Board urging them not to change the name this week when they meet to discuss the issue.
The school is Nathan B. Forrest High School and, as Iwrote in this recent post, a petition with nearly 120,000 names on change.org is asking the Florida school district to change the name. Back in April 2007, when the school board was asked by the School Advisory Council to change the name, the panel voted 5-2 against it, but there are new members on the panel now.
Why is the school named after a KKK grand wizard? When it opened in 1959, a number of names were suggested but an organization called the Daughters of the Confederacy somehow won the day with Nathan B. Forrest, who was a Confederate general in the Civil War and the first “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, more than half of the school’s students are African American. You can read below a description of that 1959