Remains of Confederate General, Wife Being Exhumed

The Confederate general whose statue was already removed from a Memphis park will soon exit the park himself. Workers started the process Tuesday of digging up the bodies of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife, the AP reports. The graves will be moved to Tennessee's National Confederate Museum hundreds of miles away, but the process requires the old statue's pedestal to be dismantled before the remains can be disinterred, and it could take weeks. The park also used to be named after Forrest, but is now called Health Sciences Park.

Forrest was a slave owner and trader and reportedly a Grand Wizard of the KKK, though some of his supporters say that's not true. In 1864, his troops killed 200 to 300 Union soldiers, mostly Black, in an attack that was later called a massacre; it's still not clear whether the soldiers were attempting to surrender when they were killed. The Sons of the Confederate Veterans is paying for the disinterment process, CNN reports. The group owns the museum, which just opened in October. (More Sons of Confederate Veterans stories.)