WASHINGTON (AFP).- The statue of a pro-slavery Confederate general who joined the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan following the Civil War was removed from a park under cover of darkness in Memphis, Tennessee.

Local television stations broadcast footage Thursday of the monument to General Nathan Bedford Forrest being removed from its pedestal by a crane and driven away on a flatbed truck under a blue tarpaulin.

A statue of Jefferson Davis, who served as president of the Confederacy during the 1861-65 Civil War, was also removed overnight from a separate Memphis park.

Cheers broke out as a crane lifted the statue of Davis off of its base and moved it to a waiting truck to be driven away to an unknown destination.

"This is an important moment in the life of our city," Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said at a press conference at City Hall.

"Let us move forward from this moment, committed more than ever to a united and determined Memphis," Strickland said.

Plans to remove the Confederate monuments from the public parks had been stalled for months by legal wrangling.

The removal went ahead after the city council voted unanimously on Wednesday to sell the parks to a private entity, Memphis Greenspace, for $1,000 each, since the statues could not legally be removed from public land.

Debate over removing Confederate icons has been simmering in the United States for years as the country examines its complicated racial past.

The issue was particularly sensitive in Memphis, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Fort Pillow massacre
Forrest, who died in 1877, was a particularly controversial figure in Southern history.
A slave trader and owner of cotton plantations, he joined the Confederate Army as a private and rose to the rank of general.

Forrest's troops were accused of executing hundreds of surrendering African-American Union Army soldiers at the Battle of Fort Pillow in 1864.

Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan following the Civil War, according to some historians, although he later disavowed the group.

Lee Millar, a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, called the removal of the two statues a "disgusting display."

Millar told WMC TV it was an attempt to "destroy some Memphis history" through a "sham sale of the property."

A woman was killed and 19 other people injured in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August when an avowed white extremist drove his car into a group of anti-racism protestors.

The protestors had gathered to counter a group of neo-Nazis and white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville to oppose to a plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a public park.

In a report published in April 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) -- a civil rights advocacy group -- found that more than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy are located on US public lands, mostly in the South.

According to historians and the SPLC report, most Confederate monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation and in response to the civil rights movement.

Defenders of preserving the Confederate symbols argue that they serve as a reminder of a proud Southern heritage, and that removing them is effectively a way of erasing history.

President Donald Trump has condemned the removal of Confederate statues as "foolish" and claimed that US culture and history were being "ripped apart."


© Agence France-Presse