DOWN ALONG WITH THAT DEVIL'S BONES

A personal examination of one of the great divides in our country today.

O’Neill’s NPR podcast, White Lies, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in audio recording. In his first book, the author widens his inquiry into race and violence with an urgent and eye-opening look at Confederate monuments in the South. Hailing from Pennsylvania and studying in Alabama (where he now teaches at Auburn), O’Neill thought of himself as an “outside observer.” He focuses on the notorious slave trader and Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom William Tecumseh Sherman called “that Devil.” After the war, Forrest became the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard. For five years, the author “chased Forrest’s memory across the country.” He chronicles his talks with students, historians, politicians, and people on both sides of the issue, presenting their viewpoints eloquently and objectively. It’s “Forrest’s symbolic importance,” writes O’Neill, “that is perhaps the better bellwether for how we arrived at our current debate over Civil War monuments and memory.” In Selma, he met with the city’s first Black mayor and visited a representation of the “magical thinking of the Lost Cause advocates”—a 400-pound bronze bust of Forrest, which was later stolen. The author also recounts how, in 2015, students at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro buried an effigy of the general in front of Forrest Hall as part of a campaign to rename it. Despite the state historical commission’s leg-dragging, the students eventually won. In May 2016 at a NASCAR race in Talladega, O’Neill was stunned with the “sheer tonnage of Trump stuff for sale” and was worried that “Trump could actually win the presidency.” Outside of Nashville, the author viewed a huge, “absurd and tacky,” plastic statue of Forrest made by a segregationist. In 2017, a statue in Memphis, near where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, was finally removed. As in the other locations, O’Neill brings us right into the historically significant action.

Essential reading for how we got from “Appomattox to Charlottesville—and where we might go next.”