Taylor Swift is sounding off on authorities in her home state of Tennessee for continuing to honor “racist historical figures” with statues, and she’s calling for them all to be removed.
The pop star unleashed on Twitter on Friday afternoon, zeroing in on two specific statues — one that was recently toppled, and the other still standing.
“As a Tennessean, it makes me sick that there are monuments standing in our state that celebrate racist historical figures who did evil things. Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest were DESPICABLE figures in our state history and should be treated as such,” she began her lengthy and fiery thread of tweets. “Edward Carmack’s statue was sitting in the state Capitol until it was torn down last week in the protests. The state of Tennessee has vowed to replace it.”
Taylor quickly noted, “Replacing his statue is a waste of state funds and a waste of an opportunity to do the right thing.”
The “Lover” singer then turned her attention to another statue, this one of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a Confederate general.
“Then we get to this monstrosity,” Taylor wrote of a monument honoring the man. “Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brutal slave trader and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who, during the Civil War, massacred dozens of black Union soldiers in Memphis.”
To this day, there is still a bust of his head sitting in the State Capitol building in Nashville.
In the general’s obituary in The New York Times, he was described as “guerrilla-like in his methods of warfare… notoriously bloodthirsty and revengeful.” Last year, Tennessee’s governor declared July 13 “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day,” a move that was highly controversial at the time and continues to be. There is mounting pressure to overrule the declaration.
“Taking down statues isn’t going to fix centuries of systemic oppression, violence and hatred that black people have had to endure but it might bring us one small step closer to making ALL Tennesseans and visitors to our state feel safe – not just the white ones,” Taylor wrote. “We need to retroactively change the status of people who perpetuated hideous patterns of racism from ‘heroes’ to ‘villains.’ And villains don’t deserve statues.”
Taylor, who has recently come out publicly in support of Black Lives Matter, continued, “I’m asking the Capitol Commission and the Tennessee Historical Commission to please consider the implications of how hurtful it would be to continue fighting for these monuments.”
“When you fight to honor racists, you show black Tennesseans and all of their allies where you stand, and you continue this cycle of hurt,” she said.