Brian Wilson, Daily News Journal, March 20, 2016
The decades-old student center was dedicated in 1968 with a 600-pound bronze medallion engraved with the image of a Confederate cavalry soldier resembling Forrest. A few dozen students protested in fall 1989, the emblem was removed from campus at the end of the semester, the final days of then-President Sam Ingram’s administration.
MURFREESBORO — The Forrest Hall Task Force will receive its final batch of public input on Thursday about the Middle Tennessee State University building named after the controversial Confederate general.
When the 17-member panel convenes at 5:30 p.m, they’ll meet at the Keathley University Center — a university building that had its own battle over Confederate imagery more than 25 years before.
The decades-old student center was dedicated in 1968 with a 600-pound bronze medallion engraved with the image of a Confederate cavalry soldier resembling Forrest.
After hundreds of students protested in fall 1989, the emblem was removed from campus at the end of the semester, the final days of then-President Sam Ingram’s administration.
“I was stunned,” said Vincent Windrow, then a student who called for the removal of the medallion. “It was unbelievable.”
As with the Forrest Hall debates, the discussion over the KUC medallion was not the first skirmish about the Civil War emblems on MTSU’s campus. For decades, university officials have grappled with the role of Confederate imagery and how it affects campus and the broader community.
Much of the institution’s controversies have been connected with Forrest, the Civil War general and cavalryman with strong ties to the state.
While critics have questioned Forrest’s role in the early Ku Klux Klan and how his troops handled the Fort Pillow massacre in West Tennessee, supporters call the Confederate general a brilliant military mind who denounced the KKK before his death.
The university’s history with the Confederacy largely developed in the mid-20th century decades after MTSU was founded, said Derek Frisby, a global studies professor, chair of the Forrest Hall Task Force and author of an essay investigating the role of Forrest on campus.
As soldiers returned from military service and enrolled at the university through the G.I. Bill, Frisby said there was a desire to create a mascot and symbols for the university and to connect with the broader community “still recovering from the war physically and emotionally.”
Forrest was known locally for his unit’s raid into a Union-occupied Murfreesboro to save the lives of residents and Confederate soldiers held captive at the historic courthouse.
“To them, this was a completely logical choice,” Frisby said. “It bonded the community and campus together.”
The memory of the Confederate general experienced a sort of regional revival during the 1950s, when Dixie symbols were popular on college campuses, Frisby wrote in his essay, “The Blue Raiders and the Gray Wizard.”
By the end of the 1950s, the university’s mascot was a Forrest-like figure, the marching band played “Dixie” as a fight song and the school’s ROTC building was named after the cavalryman, Frisby wrote.
While the emblems took hold in that decade, Frisby said there was no evidence that university officials endorsed them because of race.
“It’s hard to argue there was a conspiracy,” Frisby said in an interview. “Sometimes a coincidence is just that. But it did create some problems.”