October 9, 2017 - Following the August 12 events in Charlottesville, VA, where a white nationalist rally left 34 people injured and one person dead, 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer, urgent calls have been made for the removal of Confederate statues and monuments. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy' report, there are at least 1,503 Confederate symbols in public spaces, including monuments, statues, markers and plaques. Three of those monuments are in Shelby County, two of which include the Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest statues in city parks in downtown Memphis. Shelby County commissioner, attorney and civil rights activist Walter Bailey, 76, supports the idea of the Confederate monuments being removed. "Unfortunately, the state legislator has seen fit to weigh in and throw out or block the efforts of the City of Memphis to exercise its sovereign right in removing those despicable monuments," Bailey said. "Right now, it appears that this whole thing rests with the courts and of course there are other imaginative methods, I take it, perhaps of dealing with this such as the city relinquishing its interests in those parks and allowing private or other non-entities that are not government, to take possession and maybe that gets around what the legislator has done." (Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)