Tag Archives: Nathan Bedford Forrest

N.B. Forrest High School and the Other Pandemic: Opioid Addiction

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There’s a desperate addiction problem in every corner of the American landscape. This story is personal. It looks back 30 years to high school, to friendship, to youth, to what strange turns time takes with our lives, to how addiction can turn someone into a completely different person.

Remembering the Be-Ins at Willowbranch Park

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For the briefest of moments, it was the most magical time, wild yet somehow innocent. The be-ins at Willowbranch Park in the late ’60s featured a broil of young musicians, out of which rose the Allman Brothers Band. The be-ins meant long hair, beads and tie-dye, hippies walking barefoot through Riverside, cheap rent in old mansions, but more than anything, they meant music.

You Know this City if You’ve Crossed its Central Divisions: Myrtle Avenue Underpass / Subway / Tunnel

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For well more than a century, the crossroads sunken into the Myrtle Avenue Underpass has taken lives, defined neighborhoods, separated beneficiaries from the poor the city’s more harshly judged.

Streetcars crossed the sump betwixt downtown and urban black Jax and an innocent electrician died liked a serial killer. 

The crossroads flooded and the crossroads flooded and the crossroads flooded and the crossroads flooded.

The Klan in Jax Politics, Story no. 6

Click below for the sixth story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

Confederate generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest formed the KKK in Tennessee in the wake of the Civil War in 1866. A prominent Jacksonville attorney and Klansman had dubbed himself Nathan II in 1950.

Jacksonville would name another prominent bridge after Governor Fuller Warren, former Jacksonville City Councilman and Klansman. In 1949, Warren called the Klan “covered cowards and sheeted jerks,” but only after Jax Klansman and Baptist preacher A.C. Shuler outed Warren in a sermon as a Kluxer.

New Story: Museum of Southern History

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If this “history” isn’t revisionist, it’s hard to imagine what is, and it’s full of a strange loser’s condescension: anyone who does not know these fictional facts is ignorant of history.

photo by Junah Hanuj

photo by Junah Hanuj

I let myself imagine a time when the South finally leaves the Confederacy behind and allows itself to surge free into a beautiful future.