This City Removed 2 Confederate Statues. Then the State Retaliated.

Inside the $250,000 fight between Memphis and Tennessee.

No city likes to see its funding get cut by the state legislature. But occasionally, there’s a silver lining.

Tennessee, like a few other Southern states, has a preservation law on the books preempting its cities from removing Confederate monuments. Even so, Memphis wanted to get rid of statues of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. This year, the city is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred at a Memphis motel. “We wanted to say to the world that Memphis is not what it was 50 years ago,” says Van Turner, a member of the Shelby County Council.

The city sought permission from the Tennessee Historical Commission to remove the statues, but was refused. So Memphis came up with a workaround. Turner and his allies created a new nonprofit that took ownership of the parks where the statues were located. With the state unable to preempt a nonprofit, the statues were removed. “There were a lot of lawyers involved,” Turner says. “Everybody wanted to comply with the letter of the law.”

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