Senior VA official removes portrait of KKK's great magician after Washington Post investigation

A senior official from the Department of Veterans Affairs removed from his office the portrait of a Confederate general and the famous great wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after a Washington Post reporter asked him about it. reported the newspaper on Tuesday.

According to the Post, David J. Thomas Sr., deputy executive director of the VA's Office of Small Business and Disadvantaged Enterprises, removed the portrait of his office in Washington, after the reporter told him that his About, Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave trader and the first great wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

The portrait, painted by artist Don Stivers and titled "No Surrender", costs $ 3,500 on the artist's website.

The official description of the portrait by Stivers reads as follows:

Before dawn, Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest summoned his officers, explained the perilous situation and gave them their choice: stay with the rest of the garrison at Fort William. Donelson or risk death by cutting their way. For him, there was no choice but to fight.

"It was just a nice copy that I bought and I found it very pleasant," said Thomas, a VA official since 2013, at the Post Office.

He also stated that he only knew Forrest as a "Southern General of the Civil War".

According to the newspaper, nine of Thomas's 14 staff executives are black. At least three of its employees have filed a lawsuit for racial discrimination against the senior official.

A lawyer representing two of the employees in the discrimination case told La Poste that Thomas's choice of portrait was an example of his attitude towards blacks.

"You do not hire anyone who places a photo of the Klan in his office unless you're not racist," said Post's lawyer, John Rigby.

The Veterans Section of the American Federation of Government Employees has launched a petition calling for the removal of the portrait after a union representative acknowledged the topic of being a founding member of the KKK at a meeting in Thomas's office. .

In response to a request from CNN, a spokesperson for the Department of Veterans Affairs stated that Thomas had not received any complaints about this portrait from his colleagues.

"Mr. Thomas has received no complaints from his colleagues and has only been informed of these concerns by the Washington Post," the statement said, according to CNN. Thomas immediately removed the imprint in question – a work of the famous historical artist Don Stivers – and the problem is solved. "

Born in Tennessee, Forrest was best known for the attack on Fort Pillow in 1864, also known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, which he is widely known for his leading role. The attack claimed the lives of hundreds of supporters, including an overwhelming number of African Americans, according to the US National Biography and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

In December 2017, a statue of Forrest was removed from Memphis Health Sciences Park after a city council voted in favor of their replacement by statues of Martin Luther King Jr.