Nathan Bedford Forrest High School (Jacksonville)

#241 Nathan B. Forrest High
5530 Firestone Rd., Jacksonville, FL 32244

Office: (904) 573-1170 Fax: (904) 573-1177
School Hours: 7:15 a.m. - 2:15 p.m.

Principal: Helene Kirkpatrick
SAC Chair: James Colwell
Mascot: Rebels
School Colors: Gray and Maroon

Cluster Chief: Elaine Mann, 348-7880, Cluster 3
School Board Member: Vicki Drake, 390-2373, District 6
Transportation Department Number: (904) 858-6200

Website: www.duvalschools.org/forrest

In November 3, 2008, after hearing three hours of public comments, Duval County School Board members voted 5-2 to the retain the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School. The board's two black members cast the two votes to change the name.
The board listened to passionate arguments from those on both sides. At least 140 people crowded into the meeting room.
Many in the community urged a name change, saying the Forrest name was an insult, but several spoke favorably of the general, saying the perceptions that Forrest was an "evil" man who ordered the massacre of Union troops were incorrect.
Some had suggested naming the school after the street it sits on, or honoring a graduate whose plane was shot down in 1991 over Iraq on the first night of Operation Desert Storm.
Forrest High School was opened as an all-white school in the 1950s.
It's name was suggested by the Daughters of the Confederacy, who saw that as a way to protest the U.S. Supreme Court rulings that eventually integrated the nation's public schools.
Now more than half of Forrest High's students are black.
The issue has come up several times during the past fifty years, but the School Board has never been willing to change the name. (Jacksonville has three other schools named after Confederate generals, but it also has schools named after civil rights leaders.)
Born poor in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, in 1821, Nathan B. Forrest amassed a fortune as a plantation owner and slave trader, importing slaves from African long after the practice had been made illegal.
At the age of 40 he enlisted as a private in the Confederate army at the outset of the Civil War, being promoted to cavalry general within a year.
Some accounts accused Forrest of ordering black prisoners to be massacred after a victory at Tennessee's Fort Pillow in 1864 (though some historians question the validity of that claim.)
What is known is that in 1867 the newly formed Ku Klux Klan elected Forrest its honorary Grand Wizard or national leader, but he later publicly denied being involved.
In 1869, he ordered the Klan to disband because of the members' ever increasing violence.
Forrest was dismayed to learn common criminals were joining the Klan as a cover for their activities as social predators.
After his death in 1877, memorials to him sprung up throughout the South, particularly in Tennessee. A mounted statue of Forrest and the graves of the general and his wife are in a Memphis park bearing his name.