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Students wanted it to be called Valhalla, after the great hall in
Norse mythology where Vikings slain in battle were received.
The school's Dads' Club opted for Wesconnett, after the location.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy favored a ''distinguished
Southern leader,'' such as Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest,
who also was a grand dragon for the Ku Klux Klan.
The three groups battled for their choices during a stormy School
Board meeting in September 1959. After several votes, Forrest
finally won out.
That decision has been second-guessed ever since.
The debate erupted anew Feb. 18 when Forrest basketball coach
Anthony Fields said after a game that the name was ''oppressive to
the diverse population that attends that school.''
Forrest has 1,664 students, and 37 percent are black.
Reacting to Fields' comments, City Councilman Howard Dale
introduced a resolution Tuesday asking the council to support the
renaming of Forrest. Dale said it shames Jacksonville to have a
school named for a grand dragon of the Klan. The resolution is up
for committee action this week.
A number of Forrest students, both black and white, said adults
are the ones making an issue of the name. Students are more
concerned, they said, about their grades, graduating, finding jobs
and getting into college.
''We're here to get an education, not to worry about the name of
the school,'' said Theresa Kane, 18, who is white and the Student
Council president. ''I think it's irrelevant to the purpose of our
being here. It's just a name, and it's whatever you make it out to
be.''
Student Council vice president Brian Lundy, who is black, agreed.
''That was the past, and this is the present,'' he said. ''If you
dwell on the past, you'll never move forward.''
Several students said the Klan - under Forrest - was not the
night-riding organization that it later became. And when the Klan
did become violent, Forrest quit, said Marcus Carter, a 17-year-old
senior, who is black.
''Most students don't know about the name,'' said Carter, who has
a scholarship to The Citadel military college in Charleston, S.C.
''They know what other people have said about the name. But they
haven't done any research.''
Luis Juarbe, an 18-year-old former Forrest student who now
attends Orange Park High, said students of different cultures
shouldn't have to attend a school named for a man associated with a
white supremacist organization.
''He could have been the waterboy, and it still wouldn't have
been right,'' said Juarbe, who is Hispanic. He attended Forrest for
three years until moving out of the district.
Several members of the basketball team also think it should be
changed, said Kelvin Ivory, 17.
''It doesn't seem right for it to be named after somebody who was
a racist,'' he said.
The school
Forrest opened in 1959 at the site of what is now J.E.B. Stuart
Middle School on Wesconnett Boulevard. In 1966, a new Forrest opened
on Firestone Road.
School Board member Billy Parker, Forrest's first principal, said
he's ''100 percent opposed to a change.'' Parker said Forrest has
about 20,000 graduates with yearbooks full of pictures and memories
associated with that name. He's received calls from more than 50
concerned about Dale's proposal.
In any case, Parker said, the middle of a school year isn't the
time to bring it up.
Walter Carr, Forrest's current principal, said he doesn't have an
opinion on the name.
But there are several factors the School Board would have to
consider in any change, he said. If the Forrest Rebels became, say,
the West Jacksonville Bulldogs, it would cost from $50,000 to
$100,000 for such things as new athletic and band uniforms and
repainting the school's name and mascot.
Furthermore, he said, the School Board could be faced with a
floodgate of other requests to rename schools, which could become
expensive.
The issue
The debate outside the school has not been a hot topic in
classrooms, several school officials said.
American history teacher David Morris said no one in his class
has brought it up. In making a decision, he said, the school's
history should be considered as well.
''You've got a history of 40 years of people who are still alive
and care very deeply about this place and about the name,'' Morris
said.
The man behind the name was shaped by a rough and tumble life on
the Tennessee frontier, said S. Walker Blanton, a history professor
at Jacksonville University. Born into a poor family, Forrest was a
selfmade man who became a successful businessman, slave trader and
planter, he said.
He was a tough guy, physically imposing, quick to use force with
those who insulted him, yet kind to his family and deferential to
women, said Blanton, whose specialty is the South and the Civil War.
When the war broke out, Forrest went in as a private and then
raised a volunteer regiment of cavalry. He was the only private to
rise to the rank of lieutenant general during the war.
Though uneducated, Forrest was intuitively bright, Blanton said.
His formula for victory - ''Git there fustest with the mostest men''
- became famous.
The man
Civil War historian Bruce Catton called Forrest ''an untaught
genius who had had no military training and who never possessed an
ounce of social status but who was probably the best cavalry leader
in the entire war.''
Forrest became renowned for his daring raids and a notable
victory over superior odds at Brice's Cross Roads, Miss.
In 1864, he showed tactical expertise in the engagement at Fort
Pillow, Tenn. But the victory was dimmed by a controversy that
continues today.
What happened at Fort Pillow must be viewed within ''the fabric
of the bloody guerrilla fighting'' that had been going on in
Tennessee, Blanton said. Before the fight, there was a series of
atrocities on both sides.
''So when you got a chance to get your licks in, the feeling was
that it was your turn,'' he said.
In the confusion of battle and with no flag of surrender,
Forrest's men kept shooting once they had scaled the earthworks at
Fort Pillow. It only ended when Forrest, who was a quarter of a mile
away, arrived and ordered his men to stop, Blanton said.
By then, only 58 of the 262 blacks involved in the engagement
were left to be taken prisoner. Confederates claimed the high
casualty rate came when garrison survivors ran, fighting their way
to the river.
After the war, Forrest was asked to lead the Klan, which had
probably been formed in 1866 in Pulaski, Tenn. According to Allen
Trelease in his book, White Terror, it was founded by six young
Confederate veterans thirsting for amusement or perhaps the
excitement of war time in the tedium of small-town life. When the
Klan grew, and its pranks, hazing and other activities crossed the
line into vigilante violence, Forrest called for it to be disbanded.
Blanton said his study of Forrest shows he was not the monster
some have depicted ''but an incredibly dynamic and powerful man.''