Controversies over honoring Confederate heritage are not uncommon in the South, but some activists in Mississippi are pushing the envelope even further. The Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans is proposing a license plate that honors Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Following the Civil War, Forrest was involved with the very first incarnation of the KKK. He was so closely associated with the group's formation that he is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the KKK's founder — though he was quickly elected Grand Wizard, and began centralizing disparate KKK groups under his authority. He believed that while blacks were now free, they had to continue to toil quietly for white landowners. "I am not an enemy of the negro," Forrest said. "We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."
Perhaps even more disturbing, however, were Forrest's violent actions during the Civil War, specifically a massacre of black soliders he lead at Fort Pillow, TN in April 1864. When Forrest died in 1877, his obituary in the New York Times described how Forrest would forever be known for slaughtering black troops that already dropped their guns:
rest at http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/10/mississippi-kkk-plates/
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