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A white man waved the Confederate flag and sang ‘Dixie’ at a black official in Tennessee after she tore down several small Confederate banners that were put up at a construction site near the grave of a Ku Klux Klan leader.
George ‘K-Rack’ Johnson, the leader of Confederate 901, a Tennessee-based organization that has protested efforts to remove Confederate-era monuments and symbols, is seen in the video taunting Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer on Tuesday.
Sawyer was speaking to reporters in Memphis just feet away from where once stood a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the KKK some 160 years ago.
The statue of Forrest was removed from Health Sciences Park - once known as Nathan Bedford Forrest Park - in 2017 amid widespread calls to erase traces of the Confederacy and Civil War-era relics from public squares.
The removal of the pedestal is the first part of removing the remains themselves, which ultimately will be reinterred in Columbia, Tennessee at the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs.