Anti-FOP Protesters Block Broadway, Shroud Sam Davis Statue

NASHVILLE, TN — Largely ignored for years, a statue of a Confederate soldier on the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol was shrouded in a white sheet by marchers Monday night. Protesting the national convention of the Fraternal Order of Police being held at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, the marchers also briefly blocked Broadway.

Roughly 100 demonstrators from Showing Up for Racial Justice Nashville marched and chanted outside the honky-tonks on Lower Broad, invoking particularly the name of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man shot and killed in Tulsa, Okla. last year. The marchers, in fact, carried a bust of Crutcher and chanted "Hey hey, ho ho, Betty Shelby has got to go," referencing the Tulsa officer who was charged, though not convicted, for first-degree manslaughter in Crutcher's death.

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The marchers were out in opposition to the FOP, the nation's largest police union, with SURJ apparently believing Shelby would be addressing the conference in Nashville this week, according to The Tennessean. The conference's agenda is a fairly mundane schedule of typical union business, while the seminar schedule features such topics as "Body Cameras, Car Cameras and The Media," "Community Policing in the 21st Century," "Robert's Rules of Order" and "QuickBooks For Beginners." Shelby does not appear on either schedule.

Dixon Irene, one of the organizers of the march, told marchers that policing is "an institution that started as a response to black slaves escaping" and that police have "worked alongside the KKK and other hate groups."

Criminal justice scholars generally concede that the shift from reactive law enforcement — the use of citizen-volunteers to apprehend criminals common in the early modern period — to proactive law enforcement using a centralized, bureaucratic authority, particularly in the South, developed out of patrols intended to apprehend escaped slaves, though most agree it is just one of a number of early factors — increasing urbanization and quashing labor unrest were crucial drivers in the North — in the development of what would be called modern policing.

In any event, the marchers chanted and carried signs equating the FOP to white supremacist groups explicitly or at least by implication. The FOP conference's social event had many of the union's members in the bars and clubs during the march and patrons could be heard booing and chanting back at the SURJ marchers. The march did manage to block traffic, though no arrests were made and Metro Police made no real effort to hustle things along.

“They got out and they were able to say what they wanted to say,” Central Precinct Commander Gordon Howey told The Tennessean. “No one was hurt. We didn’t have any issues. There was no destruction of property, no violence. Part of our job is to uphold the Constitution, and the First Amendment is something that’s sacred and protected and we want to ensure people are able to express their point of view, no matter what it is."

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The marchers made their way to Capitol Hill, covering a statue of Confederate soldier Sam Davis in a white shroud and chaining their bust of Crutcher to the monument.

Davis, who was born in Rutherford County, was hanged as a Confederate spy aged 21 in Pulaski by a Union force garrisoned in the town. Though contemporary sources, including Union soldiers, lauded Davis for his bravery and loyalty in the face of death, he was largely forgotten for three decades. When Confederate monument making took off in the late 19th century, many Tennesseans embraced Davis as an "acceptable" hero, unsullied by Nathan Bedford Forrest's legacy of massacring black Union soldiers, early Klan leadership and slave trading — though not necessarily slave ownership, as Davis' family had about 50 slaves.

Monuments to Davis have never inspired the same protestations as those to Forrest, though calls for their removal have picked up post-Charlottesville.

The shroud and bust were removed by Tennessee Highway Patrol officers after a half-hour or so and the THP said, as there was no damage to the Davis statue, charges are unlikely.

Image via Flickr user Brent Moore, used under Creative Commons