AL State Rep. Gives the Invocation at Event in Honor of a KKK Leader's Birthday
The same weekend that the nation honored recently deseased civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in his home state of Alabama, AL State Representative Will Dismukes (R) attended a birthday celebration honoring Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forest. The celebration took place at the home of Pat Godwin, who is the member of The League of the South, a hate group that rallied alongside neo-Nazis and were responsible for multiple violent attacks at the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, VA.
Dismukes, who represents Prattville, AL, delivered an invocation at the event as he stood surrounded by Confederate Flags. He proudly posted a (now-deleted) photo of himself speaking at the event on Facebook, writing, “Had a great time at Fort Dixie speaking and giving the invocation for Nathan Bedford Forrest annual birthday celebration!”
Forrest was a Confederate General who, prior to the Civil War, trafficked and sold enslaved Black people. During the war, he infamously led a brutal massacre of 300 Black soldiers. He later became the most visible leader of the Ku Klux Klan after its founding in 1865. As the first-ever Grand Wizard of the Klan, Forrest personally participated in multiple acts of murder and terrorism.
Despite the obviously racist implication of his attendance and speech, Dismukes denied that celebrating a founding leader of the KKK was, in fact, racist: “The post was in no way intended to seem as if I was glorifying the Klan or any party thereof.”
Other elected officials sharply disagreed. “It’s totally insensitive,” said State Rep. Christopher England (D), chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party. “It should not be where the state of Alabama is in 2020, where one of our elected officials in Alabama celebrates someone like that.”
Dismukes’ connection to Forrest and Godwin goes beyond his celebration of the KKK leader’s birthday. Dismukes serves as the Chaplain for the Prattville Dragoons, a local Sons of the Confederacy group. The Prattville Dragoons have long celebrated Forrest, engaging in a substantial $25,000 fundraising effort in the early 2010s to re-build a monument to the Grand Wizard after his bust was stolen. In a 2012 blog post on the group’s now-private website, Godwin described the fight over the Forrest monument as a “war,” writing, “there is a reason this war continues to exonerate [Forrest] in OUR time as he was exonerated in HIS time.”
As part of its core tenet of anti-Black racism and white supremacy, the Klan has a long history of antisemitism, with an increased focus on demonizing Jews coming in the early 20th Century, when, inspired by the popularization of the notably racist film, Birth of a Nation, the Klan reformed. While it still exists today, the Klan is no longer the central organizing home for white supremacists. Klan members and other white supremacists are far more likely to organize under the banner of groups like American Patriots USA, which is led by a former Georgia Grand Dragon, as well as neo-Nazi groups like The Base and Attomwaffen.
Despite multiple calls for his resignation from Democrats, and sharp criticism from Republicans, Dismukes stated that he would not resign. The month prior, Dismukes asserted that he would he apologize for his involvement with the Prattville Dragoons.
UPDATE AS OF JULY 30, 2020:
On July 30, Dismukes announced his resignation from his position as Pastor of the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church.