SPEAKER_01: to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather, from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease, to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear, and T-shirts are the number one, two, and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless, and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll wanna get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash 99 P-I and use code 99 P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas, B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash 99 P-I, code 99 P-I. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Our motto is always read the plaque. It's always worth stopping to see what person or event is being commemorated in stone and metal. The person being depicted is not always worthy. The story being told is not always true. Plaques often tell you more about the person who commissioned them than the historical figure that they are honoring. It's still worth always reading the plaque, but it's not enough to just read the plaque. If I had to nominate one person to write all the plaques in the world, my choice would be Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace. He produced an episode about a statue and an imagined plaque in 2015 that just destroys me. It's so good. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and I want you to hear it.
SPEAKER_02: Notes on an imagined plaque to be added to the statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest upon hearing that the Memphis City Council has voted to move it and the exhumed remains of General Forrest and his wife, Mary Ann Montgomery Forrest. From their current location in a park downtown to the nearby Elmwood Cemetery. First, it should be big, the plaque. Not necessarily because there's so much to say, though there is so much to say, but big enough to be noticed on the side of this rather grand monument after they move it and the bodies beneath it across town to the cemetery. And not just big for the sake of bigness, it needs to stick out as something off, something that disrupts the admirable balance of the statue, currently so tasteful, regal even, this bronze man on this bronze horse, goatee, square jaw, you get it. You've seen it before, even if you haven't seen it before. The statue faces north. The sculptor wanted Forrest to face south to better catch the light, but people complained. Said it would imply that the general was retreating and he wasn't a man who retreated. He surrendered once, but if the sculpture faced north, maybe people would forget that part, I guess. So anyway, the plaque has to be big enough to catch your eye when you're checking your cell phone or walking your dog or eating a chicken Caesar salad from a plastic box on a bench, whatever people are doing there in the cemetery and whatever they might do there in the future, because that's why we make these things, right? Plaques, bronze men on bronze horses. We want people in the future to remember. But first we want them to notice. So let's think about material for this imagined plaque. Maybe the plaque should be garish, not intentionally ugly, not necessarily, but like titanium maybe. A patch of Frank Gehry futurism on the staid stately old thing. It would catch the light and catch the eye in contrast to the northward facing brown green man on his brown green horse, or a great pigeon lit on his brown green epaulette. And I like that the Gehry of it all, the futurism, is not at all futuristic, it's millennial. A decade from now it'll be dated, literally dated. Bilbao or Disney hall or wherever will seem so late 90s, so 2000s, and you'll scoff. And I want that. I want this plaque to be fixed in time, to let people know when it went up, let people know what was up at the time, because that is the point here. The point of this plaque is to make sure that these future people realize that this lovely old story wasn't always old and wasn't always here in the cemetery. And moreover, I want the reader, standing there in the shadow cast by the late, somehow still lamented, Nathan Bedford Forrest, on some future summer Sunday, to know why it wound up in a park on the other side of town in the first place. Because memorials aren't memories, they don't just appear upon death. A letter of surrender, signed in some farmhouse at the edge of some battlefield, doesn't give me a chance to think that Mama [...] doesn't come complete with a historic marker affixed to the door. The monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest was put in that park downtown for a reason, at a specific moment in time. And at that time, channel Forrest and Mrs. Forrest were already buried in Elmwood Cemetery, the same place the City Council recently voted to put them. dug up from the ground because a group of prominent Memphians thought they were better off somewhere else. That was 1905, 40 years after the war, 30 years after Forrest's death. They felt the city needed Nathan Bedford Forrest right then, because they had seen that city fall from great heights. Memphis had been left relatively unscathed by the war, but not by its outcome, not by the end of the slave trade that had been one of the economic and cultural pillars of the city. Without the slave market selling men and women and children, and without the riverboats and crews and suppliers and dockworkers sending them up and down the river, Memphis was hardly Memphis anymore. And then there was the Yellow Fever that had swept through the
SPEAKER_02: city some years before and killed so many, and drove many more away, people who never returned after a mandatory evacuation. And now it was the turn of the next century, and the city was increasingly, let's just say it, let's just stop not saying things. Increasingly black, and increasingly tense. White businesses did not like competing with black businesses, black people did not like being lynched. This move to move Forrest started not long after Ida B. Wells, a Memphian too, had started writing, rabble rousing, boldly, bravely, against lynching. After her friend Thomas Moss was improperly imprisoned, after a fight between children over a game of marbles escalated until adults were threatening to burn down his store, and after Moss wound up being pulled from that prison and strung from a tree, and Wells was threatened so much so often that she moved away, and the paper she had written for burned to the ground. So wealthy white Memphis, at the beginning of the 1900s, found all of this unpleasant. So they raised money, $33,000, not to rebuild that newspaper office, or build a police force that would properly protect all of its citizens, but to make a monument to a man they thought best represented a Memphis they had lost. A man who had risen from nothing, a blacksmith's boy, who became a millionaire, and then believed so strongly in the Confederate cause that he enlisted as a private, then went on to prove himself perhaps the most brilliant military man born on American soil, even if he didn't fight for America. Those are facts. That's a true story. And they like what this story said about the American dream, even if it wasn't technically American, even if Forrest Million was made by buying and selling human beings, and selling cotton raised and picked and cleaned and packed by enslaved human beings, even if the cause for which he employed that military genius was to ensure that men like him could rise up from nothing and make a million dollars, buying and selling human beings, and stealing their lives and their labor. In 1905, they held a parade at the unveiling of the new statue and made speeches to honor the northward-facing general. They said nothing of slavery. They said much about heritage, and honor, and chivalry. They said nothing of how Nathan Bedford Forrest had been the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, nothing of the terror it had wrought, nothing of the assassinations or the lynchings, nothing of how it sought to undermine and overthrow the nation's political order, the nation that they celebrated there in Memphis in 1905 when they played the Star-Spangled Banner and Yankee Doodle Dandy right alongside Dixie. They might not have mentioned any of it, but they knew it, knew about Forrest and the Klan. They'd certainly read the Klansman. It was flying off the shelves that year, a novel about heroic men hidden beneath bedsheets, out to save white virtue from black barbarians. It was a historical romance, that's how it built itself, that looked back longingly to a time not long before, when people were still chivalrous, who'd stand up against barbarism and miscegenation and instability and stand up for order, private property. Who better to represent what they had lost than Nathan Bedford Forrest? They talked about his heroism in battle, though they didn't talk about the Battle of Fort Pillow, when Forrest ordered the massacre of hundreds of American troops attempting to surrender, most of them former slaves. They talked about his faith instead, his strapping build, and about their own hopes, that future Memphians would gaze upon Nathan Bedford Forrest and be inspired. They even raised some extra cash for a skating rink so that the white children of Memphis could play nearby in the shadow of this great man and learn from his shining example, though the bronze wouldn't shine for long. What brown and green is this symbol of all that was good was exposed to the light of the sun and washed by the rain. There is debate, there is always debate, about what the Klan meant when Forrest was its wizard, about his intentions at Fort Pillow. They say Forrest repented his sins and his crimes and his deathbed. Should that be on the plaque? Should it note his regret? They say no. May it have ruined him. May it have corroded him, like rain on bronze. May it have choked him, like smoke from the crosses and homes and churches burnt by men who revered him decades and decades later, revered him at least in part because some influential Memphians decided they needed to revere him in this way, in that park, in 1905. So the plaque should be big, but it can't be big enough to say all that. Maybe it should just say, maybe they should all say, the many, many thousands of Confederate memorials and monuments and markers, that the men who fought and died for the CSA, whatever their personal reasons, whatever was in their hearts, did so on behalf of a government formed for the express purpose of ensuring that men and women and children could be bought and sold and destroyed at will. Maybe that should be enough. But I want people to know about those Memphians in 1905, who wanted people to remember Forrest and why, who wanted a symbol to hold up and revere, to stand for what they valued most. I want people to know that that statue stood in downtown Memphis for 110 years, and to remember that memorials aren't memories. They have motives. They are historical. They are not history itself. And I want them to know why it was moved. That in 2015, after Clementa Pinckney and Chiron de Coleman Singleton and Tywanza Sanders and Ethel Lance and Susie Jackson and Cynthia Hurd and Myra Thompson and Daniel Simmons Sr. and DePayne Middleton-Doctor were murdered in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, there were people in Memphis who were done with symbols and ready to bury Nathan Bedford Forrest for good. In 2016, the Tennessee Historical Commission
SPEAKER_01: ended up denying the Memphis City Council's plan to move the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from the park. It's still there as of August 2017. The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have resulted in protests at the site of the statue and renewed calls by the public and city officials to have the monument removed. The Memory Palace is produced by Nate DiMeo. You should subscribe to it and get all the old episodes. They're short, they're beautifully written and produced, and they're what podcasting was invented for as far as I'm concerned. The staff of our show includes Katie Mingle, Avery Truffleman, Shareef Yousif, Sean Rial, Kurt Kolstad, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible spelled K A C H A V A and get 10% off your first order. That's K A C H A V A dot com slash invisible kachava.com slash invisible. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform, Canva, makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design headstart. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at canva.com, the home for every brand. The international rescue committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support. Allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on
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SPEAKER_01: and Reddit too. But our lovely home on the internet with more design stories than we can ever tell you here is our website. It's 99PI.org.
SPEAKER_00: Tune associate today. Discount type.
